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.
I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement.
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
My books never go where I think they're going.
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.
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