Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley
Jane Smileyis an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 September 1949
CityLos Angeles, CA
CountryUnited States of America
love-is emotion
Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
lying wicked good-intentions
Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
college years law
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.
horse essence expression
A horse herd was, in its very essence, the manifestation of the expression 'It's always something.
family coming-out tolerate
The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.
essence giving charity
The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
groups want way
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.
children house noise
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.
horse ignorance years
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.
steps one-step-at-a-time easy
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 exercise taste
Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.
thinking two years
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 footnotes
Novelists never have to footnote.
thinking toxic toxins
everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.