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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Jane Smiley Quotes

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings – that is their paradox.

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.

– Jane Smiley

Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer’s is coming mocks all one’s aspirations – to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one’s accomplishments and hard work – in a way that old familiar death does not.

– Jane Smiley

I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn’t. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.

– Jane Smiley

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

– Jane Smiley

One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money.

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

‘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.

– Jane Smiley

Oh, that sound? I’m in the hot tub, reading a novel.

– Jane Smiley

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

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

I learned why ‘out riding alone’ is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

– Jane Smiley

People are quite frequently eccentric.

– Jane Smiley

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

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

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

– Jane Smiley

There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

– Jane Smiley

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

– Jane Smiley

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

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

In many ways, being honest about ‘Huckleberry Finn’ goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

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.

– Jane Smiley

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