Top 200 Jane Smiley Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Jane Smiley

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading

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

— Jane Smiley

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

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

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

6. “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

7. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

9. “After a long day, folk rest at night. After a long summer, folk play games and sit about in the winter. After a long life folk sit about the fire and stay warm, for the chill of death is upon them, and even the thickest bearskin can’t keep off the shivering.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

12. “English majors understand human nature better than economists do.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

14. “Respect and fear are two different things.”

— Jane Smiley

15. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

17. “When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.”

— Jane Smiley

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

20. “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

21. “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!”

— Jane Smiley

22. “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

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

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

25. “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!’”

— Jane Smiley

26. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

27. “I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.”

— Jane Smiley

Featured in: Romance Quotes

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Evil people must spread their evil everywhere.”

— Jane Smiley

32. “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

33. “The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.”

— Jane Smiley

34. “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

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

— Jane Smiley

36. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

37. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

38. “Many said that now there was no hope of salvation, for a man might do anything and be in the wrong. There was no way to tell. It was better to stay on the steading and mind the cows and be content with such days as are left to one and cease to wonder about life everlasting.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

40. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Jane Smiley

44. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

46. “My great fear is not that I’ll run out of ideas. It’s that I’ll run out of time.”

— Jane Smiley

47. “Hungry ears are sharp ones.”

— Jane Smiley

48. “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

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

— Jane Smiley

50. “People with good intentions never give up!”

— Jane Smiley