Paula Fox Quotes

22 quotes in 335 categories

• A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.
• Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.
• The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don't know when that one-day…
• I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.
• I don't like to listen to music while I'm working.
• 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.
• I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.
• In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.
• My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied…
• It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.
• Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.
• A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.
• You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

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