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Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family

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
Incompetent
Competent
Groups
Family
Men
Mimic
Playground
Playgrounds

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There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.
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A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
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Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
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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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I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
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Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
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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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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.
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Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.
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People are quite frequently eccentric.
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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
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I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
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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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The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
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Respect and fear are two different things.
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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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A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.
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Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
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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.
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