In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
— Grace Paley
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.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
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.
I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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 don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
If you want to do things, do things.
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.
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 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.
'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.
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.
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget 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.
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.
What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
