Jane Smiley Quotes

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

The older I get, the more my curiosity grows, and every book I write is a new exploration.

I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.

Lyrically I like to use themes that make the listener use his or her imagination, and to give a little of the lessons I've learned in my own life.

I have a lot of fun writing for artists, but I'm learning to apply that fun to myself.

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.

Sometimes it might seem like I'm using my songs to give other people pointers. But mainly, they're for me, just little notes to myself that I collected, and the wisdom that I've read. I give myself a lot of advice.

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

The story of 'Lasers' is my story. I didn't have to look too far to get subject matter for this record; it was stuff that was happening to me.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

I might have lived long enough to learn all this in the long haul, but I would have been just another soul taking up time and space for a long spell before I learned.

Ten years of character development affords you a lot. You get a chance to dig deeper and deeper and deeper into a person.

All my mistakes, all my accomplishments, the good things I've done, the bad I've done, and the mistakes I've learned from, the mistakes I've never done before - all of that made me into what I am now.

Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned

The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.

Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.

When you make a film it is like asking yourself a question. When it is finished, you know the answer. Ultimately with all of cinema, we are just trying to learn about ourselves. I have always used the opportunity to make a film to learn more about myself, which I am still doing.

We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.

I really liked the idea of creating a journal myself. It's like the way I clear my throat. I write a page every day, maybe 500 words. It could be about something I'm specifically worried about in the new novel; it could be a question I want answered; it could be something that's going on in my personal life. I just use it as an exercise.