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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.

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
Life
Learned
Knew
Predated
Read
Schoolgirl
Facts
Fascination
Mother
Horses
Wanted
Horse
Thing
Writer
Every
Single

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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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Novelists never have to footnote.
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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.
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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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Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
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A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
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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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Respect and fear are two different things.
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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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People are quite frequently eccentric.
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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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I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
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I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
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Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
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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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I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn't even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law.
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In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
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I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
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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.
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