Jane Smiley Quotations | Page 2

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

The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.

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

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.

I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.

With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it.

Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.

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.

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.

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

When 'The Awakening' was published it was considered so scandalous it was banned in the author's home-town library, and she herself was barred from the Fine Arts Club in the same city. What the novel has to offer, among other things, is honesty.

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.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

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.

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.

'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.

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.

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.

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

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.

Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family

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.

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!'

You cannot be an egomaniac on the horse. If you lose your temper and start beating him, either you will destroy him, or he will destroy you. As soon as you start riding horses seriously, you're being disciplined on a daily basis about how ignorant you are and what there is left for you to learn.

But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses

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.

The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.

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.

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.

Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

'Lean on Pete' is the story of a boy and his horse, but it is never heart-warming - it ranges in tone from desperate to merely painful - and, while fascinating, it is never entertaining or redemptive. But if you want an unadorned portrait of American life (at least in some places) at the beginning of the 21st century, this is the book for you.

Just look at movies. As movies are getting bigger and bigger and more expensive to produce, the screens that people are looking at them are getting smaller.

My reading had a wonderful effect and it worked in several ways on different levels. It inspired in me the idea that it was OK to go on as a novelist in good faith and that there could be room in my consciousness and the national consciousness about thoughts other than terrorism and 9/11.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

When a novel has two hundred thousand words, then it is possible for the reader to experience two hundred thousand delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

Writing this book was incredibly fun because I soaked in the bathtub, laid around eating chocolate in bed, cooked dinner for my family and read novels the whole time.

'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.

I've been entirely opposed to it since Day one. The next practical thing to do is to get out, and since I don't imagine we're going to clean up after us, the Iraqis are going to have to clean up all the junk we leave behind.

accepted his idea that the audience for a quality novel might not be large enough to support the author by means of commerce; this idea is a truism today, but it was new, even revolutionary, for Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and many of their contemporaries.

It's a gimmick. It's more fun. Usually, you're just standing there, trying to look compelling in some way and not succeeding. It can look like a mug shot. The author can look, not exactly like a deer in the headlights, but a little bit like another night creature scuttling from burrow to burrow.

It's pure hackwork. Here it is: I produce fast, I can do it on a deadline, and I usually have something to say about anything.

It's pure hackwork. ... Here it is: I produce fast, I can do it on a deadline, and I usually have something to say about anything.

In a society that promotes conformity, ... novel-reading one person experiencing both the mind of another person and her own mind experiencing is a subversive force.

In a society that promotes conformity, ... novel-reading ù one person experiencing both the mind of another person and her own mind experiencing ù is a subversive force.

I suggest that it be used like a trunk full of fabric samples or a box of costume jewelry - it is not to be read through from beginning to end in search of a cohesive argument, but to be rummaged about in, in search of something interesting or striking.

I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?

he aspired to produce something simultaneously less vulgar and less formless than the novels of the great Victorians, and ... he wished his work to elevate the novel to the status of art.