Grace Paley Quotes - Page 4

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

Art is too long, and life is too short.

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 don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

A joke is necessary at this time.

Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.

I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.

I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

If I miss anything, it's being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.

The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

My mother went to demonstrations. I remember her going to a big demonstration for Earl Brower and she came home crying and said the Communists were very mean and booed their people. I remember feeling sad at her feeling sad.

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

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.