165 Quotes by Grace Paley

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

What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

. . . 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've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.

It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.