Grace Paley

“I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.”

“To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.”

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

“I drank a little California Mountain Red at home and thought--why not--wherever you turn someone is shouting give me liberty of I give you death. Perfectly sensible, thing-owning, Church-fearing neighbours flop their hands over their ears at the sound of a siren to keep fallout from taking hold of their internal organs. You have to be cockeyed to love, and blind in order to look out the window at your own ice-cold street.”

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

“You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.”

“The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.”

“Poets take themselves very seriously.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”

“Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

“I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my ownmemorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, calledrote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,a great human gift disowned.”

“I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.”

“'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.”

“Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)”