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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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.
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Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
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I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.
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Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
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The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
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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!
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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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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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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.
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Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
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Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
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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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Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
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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.
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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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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.
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In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
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People are quite frequently eccentric.
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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.
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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!'
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