Quote

Hungry ears are sharp ones.

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
Sharp
Hungry
Ears
Ones

More quotes by 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
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
People with good intentions never give up!
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
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
Jane Smiley
Image
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
Jane Smiley
Image
it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
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
Image
Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
Jane Smiley
Image
Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
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
Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
Jane Smiley
Image
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
Jane Smiley
Image
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
Image
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
Jane Smiley
Image
I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
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
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
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
Image
Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
Jane Smiley