Jane Smiley Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

Lyle laid out his six donuts in order — maple nut, powdered sugar, cherry, chocolate frosted, glazed, and plain. Breakfast, he knew, was the most important meal of the day.

Jane Smiley
I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.

Jane Smiley
Whether or not virtue was in fact its own reward, it did seem like sin was its own punishment.

Jane Smiley
Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

Jane Smiley
Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Jane Smiley
The one thing... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.

Jane Smiley
A bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order, and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.

Jane Smiley
You know why this is the most valuable horse in the world?... She defines the bottom. Every element of conformation that you wouldn't want in a horse, she possesses. Once a student has looked her over, has really concentrated on her, really seen her, he knows what he doesn't want to find in any horse he might ever buy in the future.

Jane Smiley
Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

Jane Smiley
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

Jane Smiley
Giving his lecture for the third time freed Dr. Lionel Gift from paying much attention to it. He had a naturally expressive style of delivery, hones over the years in elementary-econ lecture halls. He knew, without even thinking, to address the middle rows of the hall, but to occasionally "shoot" the listeners in the back corners. He knew how to make eye contact and solicit the attention of those who were thinking of other things.

Jane Smiley
There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Jane Smiley
When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

Jane Smiley
When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.

Jane Smiley
Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.

Jane Smiley
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
Everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.

Jane Smiley
A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

Jane Smiley
If I get frustrated, I'll go eat something, I'll go open another Diet Coke, I'll go the barn, I'll distract myself, and then the parts in my brain that were working click and I get an idea.

Jane Smiley
Each geographical section of Horse Heaven is organized around a different horse, so as those horses move from place to place, the characters change.

Jane Smiley
Readers [...] want to be lost in a book, and they have feelings about the characters, feelings about the plot. A writer has the same experiences as a reader, but she also has the project she's working on.

Jane Smiley
In a comic novel, the language has to stay perky so the reader will keep laughing. And yet it sort of defies making it deep, so it's hard to make it both funny and profound, comic and deep, all at the same time.

Jane Smiley
I did want to write into the future. There's a lot of science fiction that's written about the future in which they talk about how the past looks from that future. It's all discussed retrospectively. I wanted to show cause and effect.
Of her book Last Hundred Years

Jane Smiley
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley
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
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
I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.

Jane Smiley
Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

Jane Smiley
It was well known to all members of the campus population that other, unnamed groups reaped unimagined monetary advantages in comparison to the monetary disadvantages of one's own group, and that if funds were distributed fairly, according to real merit, for once, some people would have another think coming.

Jane Smiley
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