Top 45 Jane Smiley Quotes

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

A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements – the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.

Respect and fear are two different things.

I was an only child. I’ve known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.

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.

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.

I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning-to-drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends.

I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.

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.

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.

As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright’s genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.

If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play ‘The Crucible’ analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.

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

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud – 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

In December 1998, I considered myself an expert on love. I was almost a year into a relationship, one that had grown more slowly than I had wished, but once it flowered it was much more stimulating than any marriage or relationship I had known.

I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.

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.

With horses, familiarity breeds comfort. If you haven’t been around horses for a while (or ever), the best thing to do is to go to the racetrack, a horse show, a rodeo, or some other horsey activity, and watch the horses. Familiarize yourself with the way they move and behave themselves.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

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.

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.

Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don’t know any smokers now, not even my mom.

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.

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.

It once amused me that it took me three tries to pass my driver’s test and that my driving instructor told my mother that I was the least talented person behind the wheel that she had ever taught.

A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.

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.

There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons – they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

People are quite frequently eccentric.

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.

All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.

I don’t know – is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn’t stand the news, I knew that if the missile were launched, mortality would arrive in half an hour, so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling that I was 30 minutes from being dead.

The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.

In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.

I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure.

Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

Your sons weren’t made to like you. That’s what grandchildren are for.

‘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.

Vets do what doctors used to – diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.