Jane Smiley Quotes

I want the reader to know what's going on. So there's never a mystery in my books.

I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme - core tensions shared by the characters.

I have always believed that if a film has only two characters, but they do not make any sense, then the film's meaningless.

We're trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

We're in three living groups, 'cause even after the world's ended some assholes still can't get along.

We cannot temporarily stop the war until all questions of discrimination are ironed out.

the latent causes of faction [which causes men] to vex and oppress each other.

In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

If you pick up an eighteenth-century play, at the top it says 'The Argument,' and then you have a list of characters, and then you have the play. I was just always struck by that - that, of course, good drama is about conflict.

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

If you're a baboon on the Serengeti, and you're miserable, it's almost certainly because some other baboon has had the free time and energy to devote to making you miserable.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

I prefer social dramas.

We engage in the public institutions of work and school and club and team, because it is there that we find meaning and purpose. But sometimes when we engage, we find confrontation not affirmation.

Something that 'Game of Thrones' always does successfully is that action sequences are never just action sequences. There's always a point of view, and you're always identifying with one person or one group of people.

The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.

I enjoy stories that can spark a conversation.

The sense of discovery only comes when I'm making discoveries alongside the reader. It feels crucial for me to not know too much about how things will turn out. So I try to develop strong characters with recognizable desires and put them together with other characters and see what happens.

No reader wants to sit through the same scene four times in a row, unless they're radically different.

In all communities you find groups that behave badly. But you must understand them too.

Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.