Jane Smiley Quotes

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

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

People are quite frequently eccentric.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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!'

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

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.

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

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

The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.