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Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.

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
Lies
Lying
Good
Delusions
Intentions
Delusion
Wicked
Intention
Lead

More quotes by Jane Smiley

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My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.
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English majors understand human nature better than economists do.
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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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Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
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My mom was paranoid about my safety.
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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.
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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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Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
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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.
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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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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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Hungry ears are sharp ones.
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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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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.
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I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
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.
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There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.
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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
Jane Smiley