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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
Knew
Waiting
Learn
Things
Life
Suspected

More quotes by 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
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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.
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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I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.
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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it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
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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There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
Jane Smiley
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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
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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.
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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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
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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.
Jane Smiley
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Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
Jane Smiley
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Hungry ears are sharp ones.
Jane Smiley
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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.
Jane Smiley
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Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
Jane Smiley
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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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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
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The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
Jane Smiley