165 Quotes by Grace Paley

If you’re feminist, it means that you’ve noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn’t natural.

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.

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

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.

Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I CAN take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.

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.

But what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads-writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all.

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

When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it’s different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.