Jane Smiley

“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 going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.”

“I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.”

“Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.”

“I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.”

“Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn't looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it.”

“The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.”

“We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don't get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much.”

“I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?”

“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 discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.”

“The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.”

“There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.”

“I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure.”

“Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not.”

“There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.”

“Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.”

“My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.”

“People are quite frequently eccentric.”

“In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.”

“So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.”