Top 142 Quotes & Sayings by Jane Smiley - Page 3

Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.

Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.

A horse herd was, in its very essence, the manifestation of the expression 'It's always something.

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.

you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.

it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

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.

The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.

There weren't too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.

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.

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...

Novelists never have to footnote.

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

Every novel deals with social problems. It can't help it because the protagonist must come in conflict with his group. So the author has to offer an analysis of how the group and the protagonist fit. Otherwise, the reader will just say, "This makes no sense," and will put it away.

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.

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.

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.