When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the blend of joy and sorrow found in beloved books.
Zadie Smith's quote suggests that the books we cherish are not just sources of pleasure or entertainment; they also contain elements of sadness, complexity, and reflection. The phrase 'a little laughter in the dark' implies that even in difficult or challenging themes, we can find humor and light, showcasing the duality of human experience within literature.
In practice
In a book club discussion about complex themes in literature.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
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.
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.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
Most of the female characters I admire come from science fiction and fantasy, maybe because there's more permission to shake up gender roles in genre.
There are three difficulties in authorship; to write any thing worth the publishing β to find honest men to publish it β and to get sensible men to read it.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
A bookβ¦ itβs a world all on its own too. A world made of words, where you live for a while.
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.
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