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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
Rights
Point
Duties
Gotten
Concerned
Duty
Nobody
Everybody

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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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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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I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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