Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
Interpretation
Collaborating with talented writers can be intimidating but can lead to personal growth and lasting change.
This quote by Zadie Smith highlights the duality of working alongside exceptional writers. It acknowledges the fear and humility that can accompany such experiences, yet it emphasizes the profound influence these encounters can have, leading to transformative growth in one's own craft and understanding of writing.
In practice
In a discussion about literary influences, this quote could serve to highlight the importance of surrounding oneself with talented peers.
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.
The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent of teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens.
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.
Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
I had no education whatsoever, and my mother said, 'Oh, you'll get a much better education in life.' I did to some extent, though I always wish I could have tried it.
If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
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