165 Quotes by Grace Paley

My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn’t really tell stories but they were good talkers. That’s important for a writer, to hear speakers.

Sometimes before people know what they’re saying, they already love the language.

At this very moment, the thumb of Ricardo’s hovering shadow jabbed her in her left eye, revealing for all the world the shallowness of her water table. Rice could have been planted at that instant on the terraces of her flesh and sprouted in strength and beauty in the floods that overwhelmed her from that moment on through all the afternoon.

If you’re old and you’re healthy and you’re active – I don’t mean you have to be politically active – if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.

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 don’t have any degrees. I went to Hunter College one year and New York University another year. It’s just on the basis of my books that I’ve been hired at any of the places I’ve been.

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

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

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.