Jane Smiley Quotes

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

At the roots, people are still people. That's why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.

That's what was so amazing about 'Mulan.' Here is this story with all Chinese characters, and yet so many people related to her character and loved the story. So I really think as long as you have a good story that relates to a lot of people, it doesn't matter what ethnicity it is.

Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.

The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.

I think about Shakespeare. Because there have been hundreds of variations of Shakespeare's plays since they've been written, and I believe it's because they're important. They're still relevant today. 'Roots' is still relevant today. The idea that we shouldn't tell this story again is very strange to me.

Whatever is being investigated, created or produced now, in movies or TV, needs to consider the context in which it is being distributed. It's not a vacuum. There are certain universal themes of love, conflict, loyalty or family that are everlasting and that need to be presented in a way that makes it feel relevant, even if it's a period piece. You need to consider what context that film, that story and those characters are being seen in.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean it's interesting.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

In my opinion, what makes a great book is something that is universally specific.

I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being- what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

My truth is relevant and my songs are relevant, but I have to recalibrate myself and speed up my vibrations so that I can communicate with the voice of this generation.

A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is.

A good story transcends boundaries, breaks barriers and opens doors.

A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.

It is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead,--equally alive. I think the best parts of Shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. I have found it so. And so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.