Quotes by "Jane Smiley"

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

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

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.