Jane Smiley Quotes

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.

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

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

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

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.

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!'

Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.

But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

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.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

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

Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.

Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family

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

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

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.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

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.

Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.

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

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

People with good intentions never give up!

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.

The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.

We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don't get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much.

My mom was paranoid about my safety.

In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.

Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now, not even my mom.

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.

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

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

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

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

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.

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

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

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

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.

The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.

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

I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn't even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law.

Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...

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

Novelists never have to footnote.

A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.

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