Quotes by "Grace Paley"

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

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.

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

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

I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.