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.
Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories.
The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice.
In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.
They were close to the end of the beginning . . .
For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.
In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.
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