“Writing that always shines a pretty shadow on your personality or on you as a person isn’t really honest writing. People aren’t so pretty really.”
“People Aren’t So Pretty Really”
“You have to tell the truth. I don’t mean you have to write memoir, but you have to try to be honest. All the vanity and ego and trying to impress people has to be put aside. Writing that always shines a pretty shadow on your personality or on you as a person isn’t really honest writing. People aren’t so pretty really, for the most part …”
– Zadie Smith, author of three novels, including White Teeth and On Beauty
Excerpt from an interview in The Writer, June 2012
A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don’t think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer’s way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.”
– Zadie Smith, “Fail Better”
“When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.”
– Zadie Smith
More Writers on the Topic of “Truth”
George Oppen | Antonine de Saint-Exupéry | Anne Lamott | Ernest Hemingway