Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949) is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991). Read full biography of Jane Smiley →
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
An urban novelist never minds a little decay.
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... →
I learned why 'out riding alone' is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also... →
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... →
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.
Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now, not even my mom.
I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at... →
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... →
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... →
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... →
Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the... →
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... →