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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
Knew
Invented
American
John
Write
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More quotes by Jane Smiley

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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
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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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Hungry ears are sharp ones.
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Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
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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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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.
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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.
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Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
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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.
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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 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.
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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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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.
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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.
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