Quote

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

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
Think
Write
Thinking
Tell
Keep
Remember
Neither
Writing
Later
Going
Habit
Every
Written
Good
Whatever

More quotes by 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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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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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 suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
Jane Smiley
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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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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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Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
Jane Smiley
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If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.
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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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
Jane Smiley
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I learned why 'out riding alone' is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.
Jane Smiley
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All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.
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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The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
Jane Smiley
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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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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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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
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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
Jane Smiley
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Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
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