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A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

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
Novelists
Someone
Everything
Nothing
Cusp
Novelist

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My mom was paranoid about my safety.
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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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In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
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Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.
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Respect and fear are two different things.
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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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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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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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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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Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.
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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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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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Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
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Many said that now there was no hope of salvation, for a man might do anything and be in the wrong. There was no way to tell. It was better to stay on the steading and mind the cows and be content with such days as are left to one and cease to wonder about life everlasting.
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Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
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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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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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Novelists never have to footnote.
Jane Smiley
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you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
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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