A Quote by Jane Smiley

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

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Jane Smiley
American - Novelist
Born: September 26, 1949

When I was a kid I think the thing I remembered most about The Exorcist was Linda Blair being possessed by the devil, and how scary that was. It had a lot of parallels for me because the movie was challenging different ideas about faith and it was looking at religion in a darker way. Growing up I was afraid of being possessed by the devil, as an adult I'm afraid of being possessed by the world, by ignorance, and not holding on to my beliefs and what I feel strongly about.

Marilyn Manson

The traits I picked from my conversation with Captain Gopinath was his honesty. He was completely possessed at each stage by what he was doing. When he was in the army, he was possessed there. He was possessed when he started Udupi hotel or while doing agriculture. He is a perfectionist and he is very impatient.

Sudha Kongara

I did a couple of movies when I was little. You have to be possessed to be an actress, and I was not possessed... It was not my life's passion.

Nell Newman

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Robert Frost

Allow yourself to be possessed by God by receiving Jesus, and you will never be possessed by anything else.

Stormie Omartian

The first - the most obvious test of a true social entrepreneur - is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea.

Bill Drayton

I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'

Elif Batuman

He that is possessed with a prejudice is possessed with a devil, and one of the worst kinds of devils, for it shuts out the truth, and often leads to ruinous error.

Tryon Edwards

To possess money is very well; it may be a valuable servant; to be possessed by it is to be possessed by the devil, and one of the meanest and worst kind of devils.

Tryon Edwards

They were afraid of your authentic love, because authentic love is beyond their control.You are possessed by it. You? are not the possessor, you are the possessed. And every society wants you to be in control. The society is afraid of your wild nature, it is afraid of your naturalness, so from the very beginning it starts cutting your wings. And the most basic thing which is dangerous in you is the possibility of love, because if you are possessed by love you can go even against the whole world.

Rajneesh

He that is possessed with a prejudice is possessed with a devil.

Tryon Edwards

No longer possessed by possessions, we may become open enough to become possessed by God.

David Adam

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

John Fowles

I'm not possessed about owning the Buffalo Bills, just as I wasn't possessed about owning the Buffalo Sabres.

Tom Golisano

The first piece of 'long' fiction I wrote was a novella parody of Stephen King's 'Christine.' I was in high school, and my version was about a kid with a possessed locker instead of a possessed car. It was also my first attempt at humour, which fell completely flat because no one who read it realized it was a parody!

Kelley Armstrong

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

Pat Conroy

A Quote by Jane Smiley

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