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I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning to drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends.
Jane Smiley
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Jane Smiley
Age: 76
Born: 1949
Born: January 1
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Jane Graves Smiley
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Anxiety
Self
None
Reared
Children
Filled
Scariest
Learning
Rear
Bits
Helped
Five
Bars
Friends
Former
Part
Drive
More quotes by Jane Smiley
People with good intentions never give up!
Jane Smiley
Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
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
Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.
Jane Smiley
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.
Jane Smiley
The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer it's possessed by the reader.
Jane Smiley
Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.
Jane Smiley
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
Jane Smiley
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.
Jane Smiley
Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
Jane Smiley
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
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
Jane Smiley
Respect and fear are two different things.
Jane Smiley
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.
Jane Smiley
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
Jane Smiley
There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.
Jane Smiley
Novelists never have to footnote.
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
Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
Jane Smiley
a bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.
Jane Smiley
