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.
Interpretation
Writers must embrace their own unique perspectives and limitations rather than attempting to conform to a universal standard.
This quote by Zadie Smith emphasizes the importance of authenticity in writing. It suggests that writers are not merely expressing whatever they wish to express; instead, they are influenced by their individual experiences, capabilities, and identities. This highlights the idea that true creativity comes from personal authenticity and recognizing one's own voice within the constraints of one's abilities.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to encourage students to embrace their unique voices.
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.
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.
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.
To call Clive Barker a 'horror novelist' would be like calling the Beatles a 'garage band'... He is the great imaginer of our time. He knows not only our greatest fears, but also what delights us, what turns us on, and what is truly holy in the world. Haunting, bizarre, beautiful.
I hate to say this, but I always listen to the music and the instrumentation first, and then grab on to the lyrics later.
He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.
I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state.
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