Jane Smiley Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

One of the things that Ivar knew about Mrs. Walker was that she would only tell him what she knew if he asked the right question, so he spent a portion of his time meditating over what he might ask Mrs. Walker and how he might phrase the question.

Jane Smiley
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principles contain it or stand against it.

Jane Smiley
I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.

Jane Smiley
Invest everything in chickens and pretty soon you're thinking like a chicken. You know how chickens think? I do, because I raised chickens as a boy. Chickens are always looking for little bits of things in the dirt. They don't conceptualize on a higher plane. You step back from chickens and you start conceptualizing on a higher plane. That's my philosophy.

Jane Smiley
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

Jane Smiley
The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

Jane Smiley
As soon as you bring up the money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.

Jane Smiley
I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.

Jane Smiley
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
You know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.

Jane Smiley
Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.

Jane Smiley
Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion.... the converse was true also — faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.

Jane Smiley
With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief.

Jane Smiley
It still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

Jane Smiley
Prairie settlers always saw a sea or an ocean of grass, could never think of any other metaphor, since most of them had lately seen the Atlantic.

Jane Smiley
How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will not ask you for any favors.

Jane Smiley
Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

Jane Smiley
Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.

Jane Smiley
Alice embraced her routine, the spar that would float her out of trouble and into a healthy old age. At home, she worried, at work, she hummed.

Jane Smiley
Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Jane Smiley
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

Jane Smiley
A horse herd was, in its very essence, the manifestation of the expression 'It's always something.'

Jane Smiley
The essence of charity... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.

Jane Smiley
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
Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.

Jane Smiley