Jane Smiley quotes:

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.

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.

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.

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.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

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?

I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.

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.

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.

With horses, familiarity breeds comfort. If you haven't been around horses for a while (or ever), the best thing to do is to go to the racetrack, a horse show, a rodeo, or some other horsey activity, and watch the horses. Familiarize yourself with the way they move and behave themselves.

All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.

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.

There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.

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.

Respect and fear are two different things.

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.

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.

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure.

Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.

I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning-to-drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends.

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.

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.

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.

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.

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.

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.

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.

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!

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

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

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

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

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

Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.

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.

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.

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.

Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.

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

I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.

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

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.

Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.

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.

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.

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

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

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

...I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life defeating my efforts to gain some perspective.

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

So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.

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

One of the things that Ivar knew about Mrs. Walker was that she would only tell him what she knew if he asked the right question, so he spent a portion of his time meditating over what he might ask Mrs. Walker and how he might phrase the question.

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

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

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.

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.

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

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

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.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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!'

I love to write about sex. You just have to make it idiosyncratic. You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from their point of view. It's really fun. It's not erotic.

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.

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?

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

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

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

Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.

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

Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full of cows.

People with good intentions never give up!

Some people do wait their whole lives for something, and it's only when that thing arrives that they find out that they've been waiting rather than living.

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

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

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

There are five things that societies do: They reproduce; they produce food; they organize themselves in terms of law; they organize themselves in terms of belief; and they make art. Four of them are about conformity, and in these, everything would go more smoothly if people just would shut up and do what they're told. But in art it doesn't work that way.

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.

you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.

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

Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

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

Novelists never have to footnote.

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

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.

Hungry ears are sharp ones.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

There weren't too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.

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

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.