Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Interpretation
Focus on the quality of your work rather than the image or lifestyle associated with it.
Zadie Smith emphasizes the importance of the substance of writing over the perceived lifestyle of a writer. She challenges the romantic notions often associated with being a writer, asserting that what truly matters is the ability to produce good writing, which is a skill that cannot be glamorized or idealized. This perspective encourages writers to prioritize their craft and the impact of their words, rather than getting caught up in external expectations or stereotypes.
In practice
This quote can be used in a workshop on creative writing to inspire participants to focus on their skills rather than the allure of being a writer.
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.
And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage, The hairy gown and mossy cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that heaven doth shew, And every herb that sips the dew, Till old experience to attain To something like prophetic strain.
In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.
You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.
If we could be twice young and twice old we could correct all our mistakes.
Assertion is not argument; to contradict the statement of an opponent is not proof that you are correct.
We are too apt to love praise, but not to deserve it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.