Quote

a bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.

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
Order
Places
Cantankerous
Persons
Exist
Alluring
Person
Reader
Bookstore
Book
Among
Conflicting
World
Choose
Avid
Free
Bookstores
Peace
Voices
Voice
Possibly

More quotes by Jane Smiley

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Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
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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.
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In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
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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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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.
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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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Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.
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I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.
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The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer it's possessed by the reader.
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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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English majors understand human nature better than economists do.
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I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
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you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
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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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Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
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Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
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I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
Jane Smiley
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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.
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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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Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'
Jane Smiley