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I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

Jane Smiley

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Jane Smiley
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 1
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Jane Graves Smiley
War
Think
Thinking
Exceptional
Unnecessary
Cruelty
Piece
Cold
Pieces

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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
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Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
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you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
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Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
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The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
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But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses
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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 in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.
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I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.
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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.
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I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.
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Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.
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I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
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A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
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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.
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Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
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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.
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My mom was paranoid about my safety.
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I love to write about sex. You just have to make it idiosyncratic. You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from their point of view. It's really fun. It's not erotic.
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I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
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Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
Jane Smiley