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.
We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.
Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.
By being so long in the lowest form [at Harrow] I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. . . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence - which is a noble thing. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English; I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.
The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.
Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement.
If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.
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