When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the blend of joy and sorrow found in beloved books.
Zadie Smith's quote suggests that the books we cherish are not just sources of pleasure or entertainment; they also contain elements of sadness, complexity, and reflection. The phrase 'a little laughter in the dark' implies that even in difficult or challenging themes, we can find humor and light, showcasing the duality of human experience within literature.
In practice
In a book club discussion about complex themes in literature.
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.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
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