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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.

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
Two
Local
Much
Newspapers
News
Events
Sort
Read
Bigs
Flavor
Three
Locals

More quotes by Jane Smiley

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I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
Jane Smiley
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If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.
Jane Smiley
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Is human nature basically good or evil? No economist can embark upon his profession without considering this question, and yet they all seem to. And they all seem to think human nature is basically good, or they wouldn't be surprised by the effects of deregulation.
Jane Smiley
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A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
Jane Smiley
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The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
Jane Smiley
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If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.
Jane Smiley
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Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
Jane Smiley
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In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
Jane Smiley
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Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
Jane Smiley
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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
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Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.
Jane Smiley
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Many said that now there was no hope of salvation, for a man might do anything and be in the wrong. There was no way to tell. It was better to stay on the steading and mind the cows and be content with such days as are left to one and cease to wonder about life everlasting.
Jane Smiley
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Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.
Jane Smiley
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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.
Jane Smiley
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Respect and fear are two different things.
Jane Smiley
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Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.
Jane Smiley
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Novelists never have to footnote.
Jane Smiley
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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.
Jane Smiley
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I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
Jane Smiley
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My mom was paranoid about my safety.
Jane Smiley