It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Interpretation
Telling the honest beginning of a story can either sound ordinary or reveal too much personal emotion.
Zadie Smith suggests that the opening of a book carries complexities that may not resonate with readers. When trying to convey its truth, the narrative can either come off as mundane, lacking excitement and intrigue, or delve into deeply personal feelings that may not be easily shared with an audience, thus balancing between the everyday and the intimate is a challenging task for any writer.
In practice
When speaking at a literary festival, one might use this quote to discuss the challenges of storytelling.
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.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.
Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.
All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.
Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.