Jane Smiley People Quotations

People are quite frequently eccentric.

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money.

People with good intentions never give up!

Some people do wait their whole lives for something, and it's only when that thing arrives that they find out that they've been waiting rather than living.

Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.

There are five things that societies do: They reproduce; they produce food; they organize themselves in terms of law; they organize themselves in terms of belief; and they make art. Four of them are about conformity, and in these, everything would go more smoothly if people just would shut up and do what they're told. But in art it doesn't work that way.

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

Just look at movies. As movies are getting bigger and bigger and more expensive to produce, the screens that people are looking at them are getting smaller.