Grace Paley Quotes

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it… Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

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.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people’s classes.

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 write for the still, small possibility of justice.

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.

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.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

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.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?

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 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.

I didn’t write any fiction until I was past thirty.

The word career is a divisive word. It’s a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.

Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.

You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.

I don’t believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person’s senses.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

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.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.