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
waiting
I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
book order voice
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.
horse ignorant egomaniacs
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.
men groups playgrounds
Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
ice-cream fuel candy
Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.
groups analysis helping
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.
genius daring lively
As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright's genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.
romance fascination categories
I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.
inspirational success motivation
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
children father believe
When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.
ideas tolerance individuality
The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.
people seems
When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.
numbers facts different
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
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.