Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Interpretation
Focus on the quality of your work rather than the image or lifestyle associated with it.
Zadie Smith emphasizes the importance of the substance of writing over the perceived lifestyle of a writer. She challenges the romantic notions often associated with being a writer, asserting that what truly matters is the ability to produce good writing, which is a skill that cannot be glamorized or idealized. This perspective encourages writers to prioritize their craft and the impact of their words, rather than getting caught up in external expectations or stereotypes.
In practice
This quote can be used in a workshop on creative writing to inspire participants to focus on their skills rather than the allure of being a writer.
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.
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: "The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not." So don't bother to think about it! Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating; your mind will start ticking-and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It's the cheapest kind of medicine there is on this earth-and one of the best.
Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.
The Final Jeopardy! questions seem to be, by design, things you can't know. And so it's not about who knows them, but who can figure them out in thirty seconds.
A wise man told me don't argue with fools. Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who.
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