Words matter. These are the best Grace Paley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You become a writer because you need to become a writer – nothing else.
What I’m interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.
In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.
I didn’t write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Most of the Women’s Libbers I knew really didn’t want to have a piece of the men’s pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn’t even want a slice of.
Whatever you do, life don’t stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.
Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn’t help me to understand the world I lived in.
‘The Immigrant Story,’ which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn’t think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That’s the only way you get it sometimes.
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
I developed a definition – which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world – that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
I see women as oppressed, but I don’t see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.
I don’t believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person’s senses.
Poets take themselves very seriously.
That’s the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they’re extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they’re just average with a good education.
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it’s a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
