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The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.

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
Issues
Days
Inflames
Maybe
Realistic
Talking
Helps
Helping
Brave
America
View
Work
Especially
Views

More quotes by Jane Smiley

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it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
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I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
Jane Smiley
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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.
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Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
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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.
Jane Smiley
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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
Jane Smiley
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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.
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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Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
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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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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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
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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
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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
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I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
Jane Smiley