I have a confession to make: I hate reading introductions. I understand their purpose but I like to get into a book – novel or nonfiction – and I don’t like wasting my time having the author telling me why I should care enough to read the rest of their book.

So I started Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel the same way, prepared to skim through the intro as quickly as I could. But then I came to a line that stopped me cold: 

“If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.” – Jane Smiley 

At that point I flipped back to page one and started over so that I could really read the introduction – from the beginning. 

And when I re-read, here’s what I found what I’d almost missed: 

“Art, I thought, is created out of observation and insight. You don’t write a novel to salve a wound, but to bear witness.”

“A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice. The word ‘inspiration’ is a metaphor for creativity. … A metaphor is a way of capturing a feeling in words, and creating is a feeling.”

All quotes are from Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.