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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

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Jane Smiley
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 1
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Jane Graves Smiley
Ways
Natural
Subsumed
Mesh
Persons
Novelist
Person
Novelists
Way
Group
Interested
Groups

More quotes by Jane Smiley

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Hungry ears are sharp ones.
Jane Smiley
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People with good intentions never give up!
Jane Smiley
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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
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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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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
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Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'
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.
Jane Smiley
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Novelists never have to footnote.
Jane Smiley
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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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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
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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
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I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn't even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law.
Jane Smiley
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I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.
Jane Smiley
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But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses
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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There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.
Jane Smiley
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Is human nature basically good or evil? No economist can embark upon his profession without considering this question, and yet they all seem to. And they all seem to think human nature is basically good, or they wouldn't be surprised by the effects of deregulation.
Jane Smiley
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I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
Jane Smiley
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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.
Jane Smiley
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The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
Jane Smiley