Top 200 Jane Smiley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.”

— Jane Smiley

53. “People are quite frequently eccentric.”

— Jane Smiley

54. “I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don’t recognize you any longer, that’s the real compliment.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

56. “Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names – he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.”

— Jane Smiley

57. “When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.”

— Jane Smiley

58. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

59. “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

60. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

61. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

62. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

63. “We came to the corner, waited for the light, and crossed. I had no idea where we were going. I said, “I didn’t realize you were so depressed.” “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 all carry it off, and you don’t care. That’s more like how it was.”

— Jane Smiley

64. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

65. “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

66. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

68. “The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

70. “Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.”

— Jane Smiley

71. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

72. “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

73. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

74. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

75. “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

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

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

78. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

80. “We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

83. “Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.”

— Jane Smiley

84. “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

85. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

86. “Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family.”

— Jane Smiley

87. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

89. “My mom was paranoid about my safety.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

92. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

93. “An urban novelist never minds a little decay.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

95. “Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

97. “As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright’s genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.”

— Jane Smiley

98. “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.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Jane Smiley

100. “The state fair was all very well, but it shouldn’t be the last thing you saw in your life. At first you thought of people like Eloise and Frank and Lillian as runaways, and then, after a bit, you knew they were really scouts.”

— Jane Smiley