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.
Interpretation
Reading should be a balanced experience, akin to a nutritious diet, where one selects different styles to enhance understanding.
In this quote, Zadie Smith compares reading to maintaining a balanced diet, suggesting that just as one should be mindful of their nutritional intake, they should also be selective about the type of literature they consume. By contrasting the dense and elaborate style of David Foster Wallace with the more straightforward prose of Franz Kafka, she implies that readers can improve their literary health by diversifying their reading habits and choosing works that provide clarity and nourishment for the mind.
In practice
During the book club meeting, we discussed how to diversify our reading lists for a richer experience.
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 never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to.
A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
The purpose of the study of judo is to perfect yourself and to contribute to society.
I have just gone over my comet computations again, and it is humiliating to perceive how very little more I know than I did seven years ago when I first did this kind of work.
Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn
Never begrudge the money you spend on your own education.
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.
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