Quote

everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.

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
Symptom
Everything
Toxic
Thinking
Symptoms
Pollution
Avoid
Stage
Toxins
Point
Overload
Another

More quotes by 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
I love to write about sex. You just have to make it idiosyncratic. You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from their point of view. It's really fun. It's not erotic.
Jane Smiley
Image
Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
Jane Smiley
Image
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
Image
I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
Jane Smiley
Image
Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.
Jane Smiley
Image
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.
Jane Smiley
Image
Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
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
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
Image
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
Image
All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.
Jane Smiley
Image
Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
Jane Smiley
Image
Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.
Jane Smiley
Image
it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Jane Smiley
Image
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
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
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
Image
In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
Jane Smiley
Image
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