Grace Paley Quotes

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

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

Old age is another country, a place of strangeness, sometimes, and dislocation. There's a lot to be done in this country, and a great deal of pleasure there. There are friends, some of whom are sick and needful of you, as you will be of them someday. The world itself is very beautiful. It's a place where you have a lot to do. But you have to do it knowing that sometimes you will be afraid of this new country.

Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.

There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.

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

For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.

Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

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

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

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

Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

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.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

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, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.

You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.

Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?

We write about what we don't know about what we know.

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.