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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.

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
Book
Computer
Vincent
Writing
Asked
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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
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Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
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Novelists never have to footnote.
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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.
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The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
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Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
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There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.
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everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.
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I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
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A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.
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The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer it's possessed by the reader.
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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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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.
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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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you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
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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!'
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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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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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People are quite frequently eccentric.
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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