Quotes from Paula Fox

I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.

When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.

I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

Teachers inspire the smallest hearts to grow big enough to change the world.

My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth.

Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.

we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.

The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.

A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.

I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.

My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.

Freedom is a public library.

There was a siege going on: it had been going on for a long time, but the besieged themselves were the last to take it seriously.