My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
From Zadie Smith
Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.
Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us.
The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.
5 perspectives
4 perspectives
3 perspectives
1 perspectives