Jane Smiley Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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