Grace Paley Quotes

37 quotes in 614 categories

• 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,…
• I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
• Write from what you know into what you don't know.
• Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
• The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.
• To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
• I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
• Art is too long, and life is too short,
• But what's a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads-writers have always done that. If you screw up,…
• Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
• 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…
• I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
• I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
• Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
• All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
• I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
• The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
• Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
• You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
• There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

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