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
childhood fundamentals conditions
The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.
giving-up people good-intentions
People with good intentions never give up!
ears hungry
Hungry ears are sharp ones.
writing might mystery
I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
running spiritual fall
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.
bigger expensive looking movies people screens
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.
shocking
I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
aspired elevate great less novels produce status vulgar wished work
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.
beginning box costume fabric full jewelry samples search suggest trunk
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.
accepted audience author james joyce large means might novel quality support truism virginia
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.
produce pure
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.
produce pure
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.
dual eternal life poems taught
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.
beginning boy desperate life merely painful portrait tone
'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.