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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
Waiting
Learn
Things
Life
Suspected
Knew
More quotes by Jane Smiley
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
Jane Smiley
Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
Jane Smiley
Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
Jane Smiley
In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
Jane Smiley
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
Jane Smiley
I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
Jane Smiley
There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.
Jane Smiley
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
you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
Jane Smiley
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
Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop!
Jane Smiley
Respect and fear are two different things.
Jane Smiley
I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.
Jane Smiley
Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.
Jane Smiley
Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
Jane Smiley
Novelists never have to footnote.
Jane Smiley
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
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.
Jane Smiley
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
Jane Smiley
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.
Jane Smiley