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.
Learning is more effective when it is an active rather than a passive process.
I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write.
A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
I want to venture out into music education for kids. As a child, I was discouraged by a lack of money, and now I want to use my platform to give back to kids without resources.
If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.