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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Work
Made
Always
Approval
Felt
Hard
Feel
Feels

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.
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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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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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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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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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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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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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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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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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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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I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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