Top 100 Jane Smiley Quotes
#1. poking around in this dump, as it would be
Jane Smiley
#2. There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.
Jane Smiley
#3. Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
Jane Smiley
#4. I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure.
Jane Smiley
#5. Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.
Jane Smiley
#6. If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.
Jane Smiley
#7. Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.
Jane Smiley
#8. I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
Jane Smiley
#9. I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
Jane Smiley
#10. Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.
Jane Smiley
#11. Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.
Jane Smiley
#12. It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.
Jane Smiley
#13. The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.
Jane Smiley
#14. 'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.
Jane Smiley
#15. There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.
Jane Smiley
#16. Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
Jane Smiley
#17. A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.
Jane Smiley
#18. Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.
Jane Smiley
#19. There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.
Jane Smiley
#20. With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it.
Jane Smiley
#21. The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
Jane Smiley
#23. Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community.
Jane Smiley
#24. A novelist has two lives
a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
Jane Smiley
#25. Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.
Jane Smiley
#27. Her stare was like a small room he couldn't get out of.
Jane Smiley
#28. Arthur said, You must know that you don't love children for being good or bad. I know you know that.
Why do you love them?
Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don't know what's coming and maybe you do.
Jane Smiley
#29. Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.
Jane Smiley
#30. A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.
Jane Smiley
#31. Hands behind his head. He took another deep breath. The whore
Jane Smiley
#32. There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
Jane Smiley
#33. Contemplate the difference between a reason and an excuse. A reason is its own reward, but an excuse leads to disappointment every time.
Jane Smiley
#34. The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.
Jane Smiley
#35. I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.
Jane Smiley
#36. As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.
Jane Smiley
#37. There were no toys under the bed
that wasn't why he liked it. Why he liked it was that there wasn't anything under the bed
no chickens, no Joey, no Eloise, no sheep, no "no"s. He could lie under the bed and not be told anything at all
Jane Smiley
#38. Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.
Jane Smiley
#39. In truth Mr Jonas Silk was as niggardly as he was jealous, and my sister Beatrice had as much interest in Kansas as she did in the czar of all the Russias, and so my brother Mr. Horace Silk worked out his plans in a white heat of frustrated eagerness.
Jane Smiley
#40. Ron Paul, who, as someone said, wouldn't have regulated a sewer pipe running through his child's playroom.
Jane Smiley
#41. The real mystery was how your farm bound you to it, so tightly that you would pay any price (literally, in interest) or make any sacrifice just to take these steps across this familiar undulating ground time and time again.
Jane Smiley
#42. I learned why 'out riding alone' is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.
Jane Smiley
#43. 'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.
Jane Smiley
#44. what it feels like to resist without seeming to resist, to absent yourself while seeming respectful and attentive.
Jane Smiley
#45. It was one of life's treats, wasn't it, paying a visit to your past, swinging like a ball on a string away from the person you loved, always knowing that the string must pull you back, and you would be oh so glad to get there.
Jane Smiley
#46. I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
Jane Smiley
#47. When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
Jane Smiley
#48. She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.
Jane Smiley
#49. She always said, 'When I'm home, I've got to get things done, even if there are visitors. Elizabeth knows how to relax in her own house.' And then she would shake her head, as if Elizabeth had remarkable powers.
Jane Smiley
#50. He hadn't had her as a teacher, which meant that he could tell her what
Jane Smiley
#51. The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I'm being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.
Jane Smiley
#52. Every spot on earth is particular, detailed, and incomprehensibly complex.
Jane Smiley
#53. Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all.
Jane Smiley
#54. Some people do wait their whole lives for something, and it's only when that thing arrives that they find out that they've been waiting rather than living.
Jane Smiley
#55. The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.
Jane Smiley
#56. She was a Tri Delt, majoring in finding a diamond ring.
Jane Smiley
#57. In this flirtation he was conducting, he had had to rely entirely on his personality, never a good idea.
Jane Smiley
#58. In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
Jane Smiley
#59. But even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries.
Jane Smiley
#61. Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not.
Jane Smiley
#62. dark, wet sides of the well dropped maybe
Jane Smiley
#63. The state fair was all very well, but it shouldn't be the last thing you saw in your life. At first you thought of people like Eloise and Frank and Lillian as runaways, and then, after a bit, you knew they were really scouts.
Jane Smiley
#64. People with good intentions never give up!
Jane Smiley
#65. I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.
Jane Smiley
#66. It still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Jane Smiley
#67. I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we'd been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again,
Jane Smiley
#68. Is human nature basically good or evil? No economist can embark upon his profession without considering this question, and yet they all seem to. And they all seem to think human nature is basically good, or they wouldn't be surprised by the effects of deregulation.
Jane Smiley
#69. My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.
Jane Smiley
#70. English majors understand human nature better than economists do.
Jane Smiley
#71. She had a cloth in her hands. She said, Frankie hungry?
Jane Smiley
#72. A horse herd was, in its very essence, the manifestation of the expression 'It's always something.
Jane Smiley
#73. I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.
Jane Smiley
#74. Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
Jane Smiley
#75. With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief.
Jane Smiley
#76. Almonds. Apricots. Avocadoes. Some peaches I don't know. Grapefruit. Lemones. Probably oranges.
Jane Smiley
#77. In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.
Jane Smiley
#78. JOE COULDN'T STAND the noise. The giant room they
Jane Smiley
#79. The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
Jane Smiley
#80. The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.
Jane Smiley
#81. Had I faced all the facts It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced.
Jane Smiley
#82. Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'
Jane Smiley
#83. The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.
Jane Smiley
#84. Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.
Jane Smiley
#85. Once again, the curious thing was how strange and forceful the world was, how it battered and clanged and could not be withstood, and yet some individuals withstood it while others did not.
Jane Smiley
#86. If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.
Jane Smiley
#87. I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.
Jane Smiley
#88. Every novel deals with social problems. It can't help it because the protagonist must come in conflict with his group. So the author has to offer an analysis of how the group and the protagonist fit. Otherwise, the reader will just say, "This makes no sense," and will put it away.
Jane Smiley
#89. She was almost sixty and she had not been to London, or Paris, or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced, as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. But, she saw, she was balanced on a very narrow perch.
Jane Smiley
#91. She chewed the tender meat and sucked out the juices and felt the sauce coat her tongue and roll down her throat. After that, he looked still better. Another
Jane Smiley
#92. Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
Jane Smiley
#93. Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full of cows.
Jane Smiley
#94. Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.
Jane Smiley
#95. People are quite frequently eccentric.
Jane Smiley
#96. Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn't looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it.
Jane Smiley
#97. I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
Jane Smiley
#98. Respect and fear are two different things.
Jane Smiley
#99. My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.
Jane Smiley
#100. You cannot be an egomaniac on the horse. If you lose your temper and start beating him, either you will destroy him, or he will destroy you. As soon as you start riding horses seriously, you're being disciplined on a daily basis about how ignorant you are and what there is left for you to learn.
Jane Smiley
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
