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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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Jane Smiley
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 1
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Jane Graves Smiley
Life
Suspected
Knew
Waiting
Learn
Things

More quotes by Jane Smiley

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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.
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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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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In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
Jane Smiley
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Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.
Jane Smiley
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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.
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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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
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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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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.
Jane Smiley
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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
Jane Smiley
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Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.
Jane Smiley
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I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
Jane Smiley
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People are quite frequently eccentric.
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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Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.
Jane Smiley
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My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.
Jane Smiley
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Respect and fear are two different things.
Jane Smiley
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it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Jane Smiley
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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