People In Small Towns, Much More Than

You Can Be Interested In A Jane Smiley Novel Whether Or Not Anyone Says A Word. She Enters Into Her Characters Thoughts With Great Understanding And Depth.

As I Drift Back Into Sleep, I Can't Help Thinking That It's A Wonderful Thing To Be Right About The World. To Weigh The Evidence, Always Incomplete, And Correctly Intuit The Whole, To See The World In A Grain Of Sand, To Recognize Its Beauty, Its Simplicity, Its Truth. It's As Close As We Get To God In This Life, And Reside In The Glow Of Such Brief Flashes Of Understanding, Fully Awake, Sometimes For Two Or Three Seconds, At Peace With Our Existence. And Then Back To Sleep We Go.

I Was Pretty Dead Set Against Ever Writing An Academic Novel. It's Always Been My View That There Are Already More Than Enough Academic Novels And That Most Of Them Aren't Any Good. Most Of Them Are Self-conscious And Bitter, The Work Of People Who Want To Settle Grudges.

I Read Pretty Voraciously. If It's Good, I Don't Care What It Is.

I'm Not An Easy Man. I Can Be An Entertaining One, Though It's Been My Experience That Most People Don't Want To Be Entertained. They Want To Be Comforted.