Jane Smiley Quotes

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Jane Smiley

Profession : Writer

Birth : September 26, 1949

My mom was paranoid about my safety.

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

People are quite frequently eccentric.

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.

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

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

Jane Smiley

Is human nature basically good or evil? No economist can embark upon his profession without considering this question, and yet they all seem to. And they all seem to think human nature is basically good, or they wouldn't be surprised by the effects of deregulation.

Jane Smiley

Respect and fear are two different things.

Jane Smiley

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

Jane Smiley

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

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

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

Jane Smiley

Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.

Jane Smiley

'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.

Jane Smiley

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

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

'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.

Jane Smiley

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

Jane Smiley

If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.

Jane Smiley

In December 1998, I considered myself an expert on love. I was almost a year into a relationship, one that had grown more slowly than I had wished, but once it flowered it was much more stimulating than any marriage or relationship I had known.

Jane Smiley