Explore a treasure trove of wisdom and insight from Jane Smiley through their most impactful and thought-provoking quotes and sayings. Broaden your horizons with their inspiring words and share these beautiful quote pictures from Jane Smiley with your friends and followers on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blog - all free of charge. Delve into our collection of the top 124 Jane Smiley quotes, handpicked for you to discover and share with others.

At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. By Jane Smiley

Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones. By Jane Smiley

A horse herd was, in its very essence, the manifestation of the expression 'It's always something. By Jane Smiley

It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet. By Jane Smiley

Everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage. By Jane Smiley

The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness. By Jane Smiley

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

My mom was paranoid about my safety. By Jane Smiley

My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life. By Jane Smiley

Every spot on earth is particular, detailed, and incomprehensibly complex. By Jane Smiley

The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others. By Jane Smiley

said, looking for a job on Broadway. By Jane Smiley

Respect and fear are two different things. By Jane Smiley

I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don't, sort of puffs you up. By Jane Smiley

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. By Jane Smiley

In this flirtation he was conducting, he had had to rely entirely on his personality, never a good idea. By Jane Smiley

Had I faced all the facts It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced. By Jane Smiley

I'm not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply. By Jane Smiley

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

Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all. By Jane Smiley

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time. By Jane Smiley

Almonds. Apricots. Avocadoes. Some peaches I don't know. Grapefruit. Lemones. Probably oranges. By Jane Smiley

People are quite frequently eccentric. By 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. By Jane Smiley

Evil people must spread their evil everywhere. By Jane Smiley

Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community. By Jane Smiley

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

It still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco. By Jane Smiley

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

But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses By Jane Smiley

English majors understand human nature better than economists do. By Jane Smiley

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

War is inevitable when the world is fallen. If you stop one, another will start. Redemption is the only path away from war. By Jane Smiley

We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don't get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much. By Jane Smiley

We're not going to be sad. We're going to be angry until we die. It's the only hope. By Jane Smiley

She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity. By Jane Smiley

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects. By Jane Smiley

How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will not ask you for any favors. By Jane Smiley

The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted. By Jane Smiley

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

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader. By Jane Smiley

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

Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew what to do with its sour fruit. By Jane Smiley

eidetic memory. What else any of it meant to By Jane Smiley

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect. By Jane Smiley

But he was sixty-two when I was, born, and the novelty of daughters had worn away long before. By Jane Smiley

poking around in this dump, as it would be By Jane Smiley

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. By Jane Smiley

She was a Tri Delt, majoring in finding a diamond ring. By Jane Smiley

Contemplate the difference between a reason and an excuse. A reason is its own reward, but an excuse leads to disappointment every time. By Jane Smiley

It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about. By Jane Smiley

When your parents don't like you, then you are free. By Jane Smiley

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

Her stare was like a small room he couldn't get out of. By Jane Smiley

You know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life. By Jane Smiley

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion. By Jane Smiley

My great fear is not that I'll run out of ideas. It's that I'll run out of time. By Jane Smiley

I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure. By Jane Smiley

With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief. By Jane Smiley

People with good intentions never give up! By Jane Smiley

She had felt a surge of fear so strong By Jane Smiley

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel. By Jane Smiley

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing. By Jane Smiley

What Is Really Going On in Spain? was another. Who's the Boss? was about whether members of the By Jane Smiley

There were so many things Rosanna could have been besides a farm wife, she thought. But it was not a source of regret - it was a source of pride. By Jane Smiley

The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open. By Jane Smiley

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

I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment? By Jane Smiley

Ron Paul, who, as someone said, wouldn't have regulated a sewer pipe running through his child's playroom. By Jane Smiley

My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will. By Jane Smiley

This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight. By Jane Smiley

Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop! By 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. By Jane Smiley

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness. By Jane Smiley

Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!' By Jane Smiley

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you. By Jane Smiley

As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright's genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring. By Jane Smiley

dark, wet sides of the well dropped maybe By Jane Smiley

She could not imagine what she could do to reconstruct all the things she enjoyed, and she could hardly remember what it was that she had enjoyed. By Jane Smiley

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance. By Jane Smiley

As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral. By Jane Smiley

Surprised. Then everyone, by unspoken By Jane Smiley

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

I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination. By Jane Smiley

We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them. By Jane Smiley

She said, Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them. By Jane Smiley

Who you are shapes how you are loved. By Jane Smiley

not to borrow trouble by worrying about it. By Jane Smiley

who was wearing a very handsome By Jane Smiley

rain or snow. Mama worried and Papa was impressed; By Jane Smiley

Redound to the university's professed goal of excellence By Jane Smiley

Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world. By Jane Smiley

Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity. By Jane Smiley

Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past. By Jane Smiley

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out. By Jane Smiley

what it feels like to resist without seeming to resist, to absent yourself while seeming respectful and attentive. By Jane Smiley

She had a cloth in her hands. She said, Frankie hungry? By 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. By Jane Smiley

Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for. By Jane Smiley

Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family By Jane Smiley

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific. By Jane Smiley

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist. By Jane Smiley

Every novel I've written has been about finding stuff out. I'm motivated much more by curiosity than by self-expression. By Jane Smiley

An urban novelist never minds a little decay. By Jane Smiley

...and the thick, sugary covering of the snow... By Jane Smiley

Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom. By Jane Smiley

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn. By Jane Smiley

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

Novelists never have to footnote. By Jane Smiley

Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions. By Jane Smiley

He hadn't had her as a teacher, which meant that he could tell her what By Jane Smiley

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. By Jane Smiley

Hands behind his head. He took another deep breath. The whore By Jane Smiley

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice. By Jane Smiley

A novelist has two lives a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this. By Jane Smiley

JOE COULDN'T STAND the noise. The giant room they By Jane Smiley

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

Hungry ears are sharp ones. By Jane Smiley

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel. By Jane Smiley

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories. By Jane Smiley

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

They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up. By Jane Smiley

If you don't furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows! By Jane Smiley

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too. By Jane Smiley