Jane Smiley Quotes
Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
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.
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.
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.
The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
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.
Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world.
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.
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
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.
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.
A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.
Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.
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.
There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.
As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright's genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.
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!
I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.
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.
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.
In my experience there is only one motivation and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
But he was sixty-two when I was, born, and the novelty of daughters had worn away long before.
Almonds. Apricots. Avocadoes. Some peaches I don't know. Grapefruit. Lemones. Probably oranges.
This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight.
Evil people must spread their evil everywhere.
Had I faced all the facts It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced.
My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.
