Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
Interpretation
Novels should focus on creativity and the beauty of storytelling rather than mere self-expression.
Zadie Smith emphasizes that the essence of novels lies in their ability to convey beauty, humor, and cleverness through storytelling rather than simply serving as a medium for the authorβs personal expression. She contrasts the pursuit of self-expression with the art of writing, suggesting that true literary value comes from crafted narratives that resonate with readers on a deeper level.
In practice
This quote can inspire aspiring writers during a workshop about the purpose of storytelling.
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.
For the understanding of a picture a chair is needed. Why a chair? To prevent the legs, as they tire, from interfering with the mind
People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.
Yes, I've always been fashion conscious.
If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.
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