Quotes from Grace Paley

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

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

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.

'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.

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.

We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.

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.

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.

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

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.

Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I CAN take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.

Still, it is like a long hopeless homesickness my missing those young days. To me, they're like my own place that I have gone away from forever, and I have lived all the time since among great pleasures but in a foreign town. Well, O.K. Farewell, certain years.

La idea de que me iré de un mundo que está cada vez peor no me gusta, porque siempre pensé que era mi deber dejar el mundo mejor de lo que lo había encontrado. Si se tiene el hábito de ver cada día como una jornada completa, envejecer es interesante. Todos los días se conoce a una persona nueva, una puesta de sol nueva. Todos los días pasan cosas hermosas".

He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away.

I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.

I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago. ("Wants")

plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

Las mujeres han comprado libros escritos por hombres desde siempre, y se dieron cuenta de que no eran acerca de ellas. Pero continuaron haciéndolo con gran interés porque era como leer acerca de un país extranjero. Los hombres nunca han devuelto la cortesía".

Let her live in the air,' said Peter. 'I bet you do. Let her love her body.' 'Let her,' said Anna sadly.

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

My dear, no one knows the power of good sense. It hasn't been built up or experimented with sufficiently.

Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.