Grace Paley Quotes about Writing

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

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

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.

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

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 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.

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

My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

Write from what you know into what you don't know.

I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

I did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.

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

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.

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.

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

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