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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

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Jane Smiley
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 1
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Jane Graves Smiley
Everything
Symptom
Thinking
Toxic
Symptoms
Pollution
Avoid
Stage
Point
Toxins
Another
Overload

More quotes by 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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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.
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Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
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I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
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Hungry ears are sharp ones.
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Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
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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.
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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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I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
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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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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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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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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
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Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
Jane Smiley
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A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
Jane Smiley
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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.
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Novelists never have to footnote.
Jane Smiley
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If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.
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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