Jane Smiley Quotes

102 quotes in 1619 categories

• 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…
• In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured…
• Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn't stand the news, I knew that if…
• 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…
• Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at…
• When 'The Awakening' was published it was considered so scandalous it was banned in the author's home-town library, and she herself was barred from the…
• Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times…
• Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.
• Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
• The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.
• But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses
• 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…
• A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path…
• 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…
• I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
• You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes…
• 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.
• Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.
• In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
• 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…

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