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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Duties
Gotten
Concerned
Duty
Nobody
Everybody
Rights
Point

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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
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