Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
Interpretation
Collaborating with talented writers can be intimidating but can lead to personal growth and lasting change.
This quote by Zadie Smith highlights the duality of working alongside exceptional writers. It acknowledges the fear and humility that can accompany such experiences, yet it emphasizes the profound influence these encounters can have, leading to transformative growth in one's own craft and understanding of writing.
In practice
In a discussion about literary influences, this quote could serve to highlight the importance of surrounding oneself with talented peers.
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.
Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.
History education in schools is so poor that students often enter college ignorant of the past - and leave just as unenlightened.
What is learned without pleasure is forgotten without remorse.
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
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