Quote

Novelists never have to footnote.

Jane Smiley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jane Smiley
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 1
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Jane Graves Smiley
Footnote
Footnotes
Novelists
Never

More quotes by Jane Smiley

Image
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
Jane Smiley
Image
Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.
Jane Smiley
Image
Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.
Jane Smiley
Image
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
Jane Smiley
Image
I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
Jane Smiley
Image
it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Jane Smiley
Image
Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
Jane Smiley
Image
English majors understand human nature better than economists do.
Jane Smiley
Image
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.
Jane Smiley
Image
Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.
Jane Smiley
Image
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.
Jane Smiley
Image
Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
Jane Smiley
Image
If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
Jane Smiley
Image
I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning to drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends.
Jane Smiley
Image
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.
Jane Smiley
Image
Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
Jane Smiley
Image
The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
Jane Smiley
Image
The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer it's possessed by the reader.
Jane Smiley
Image
In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
Jane Smiley
Image
I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
Jane Smiley