I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
Interpretation
The author expresses a disdain for structured creative writing classes and highlights a personal approach to writing.
In this quote, Zadie Smith reveals her belief in the value of personal experience and instinct over formal education in creative writing. She implies that the pressure and structure of classes may hinder genuine creativity, suggesting that writing is a natural, individual process that should not be confined to rigid frameworks.
In practice
During a workshop on writing, I shared Zadie Smith's quote to spark a discussion on the value of personal style versus formal training.
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 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.
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.
The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
The knowledge we now consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information effective in action, information focused on results. Results are outside the person, in society and economy, or in the advancement of knowledge itself. To accomplish anything this knowledge has to be highly specialized.
We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.
As parents, we teach our kids about things we feel competent in. That's why so many parents don't teach their kids about money.
One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.
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