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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
Concerned
Duty
Nobody
Everybody
Rights
Point
Duties
Gotten

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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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You're a library of me.
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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All tastes are expressions of belief.
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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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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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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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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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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
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