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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.

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
Specific
General
Marriage
Emotion
Love

More quotes by Jane Smiley

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Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
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.
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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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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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.
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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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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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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I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
Jane Smiley
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Is human nature basically good or evil? No economist can embark upon his profession without considering this question, and yet they all seem to. And they all seem to think human nature is basically good, or they wouldn't be surprised by the effects of deregulation.
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.
Jane Smiley
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Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
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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Respect and fear are two different things.
Jane Smiley
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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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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
Jane Smiley
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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.
Jane Smiley
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My mom was paranoid about my safety.
Jane Smiley
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There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.
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