Jane Smiley Quotes

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part.

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.