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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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you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
Jane Smiley
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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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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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Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.
Jane Smiley
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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
Jane Smiley
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Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.
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 say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.
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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it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Jane Smiley
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I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
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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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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I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
Jane Smiley
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Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
Jane Smiley
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People are quite frequently eccentric.
Jane Smiley
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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
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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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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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