I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of diverse literary influences to develop one's own voice.
In this quote, Zadie Smith expresses the value of reading a wide range of authors and styles to escape one's own literary voice and gain new perspectives. By immersing herself in works from various writers, she advocates for the idea that exposure to different narratives can enrich a writer's craft and inspire innovation in their own work.
In practice
In a literary discussion about the influence of various authors on one's writing style.
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.
Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed.
The more that everyone has access to the same educational opportunities, the more society will tend to accept some receiving disproportionate rewards. After all, they themselves have a chance to be winners.
To instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens...this brings us to the point at which are to commence the higher branches of education . . . . To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order.
No instance exists of a person's writing two language perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.
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