Grace Paley

“If you want to do things, do things.”

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

“What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.”

“My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.”

“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.”

“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 often see through things right to the apparition itself.”

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

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

“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.”

“My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.”

“Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing 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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”