Grace Paley
In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.Collection: Beauty
Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.Collection: Courage
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
'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.
Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.
What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
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.
Poets take themselves very seriously.
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.
I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
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 was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.
If you want to do things, do things.
Old age is another country, a place of strangeness, sometimes, and dislocation. There's a lot to be done in this country, and a great deal of pleasure there. There are friends, some of whom are sick and needful of you, as you will be of them someday. The world itself is very beautiful. It's a place where you have a lot to do. But you have to do it knowing that sometimes you will be afraid of this new country.Collection: Beautiful
I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.Collection: Writing
Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.Collection: Sometimes
Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.Collection: Writing
The only recognizable feature of hope is action.Collection: Action
People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.Collection: Writing
For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.Collection: Meaning Of Life
I write for the still, small possibility of justice.Collection: Writing
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.Collection: Justice
Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.Collection: War
The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.Collection: Kids
I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.Collection: Lying
The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don't live with a lover or roommate who doesn't respect your work. Don't lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.Collection: Fun
You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.Collection: Able
Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.Collection: Book
I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.Collection: Jobs
Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?Collection: Together
The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.Collection: Lying
Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.Collection: People
You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.Collection: Long
To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.Collection: Mean
We write about what we don't know about what we know.Collection: Writing