78 Quotes by Paula Fox

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

I don't like to listen to music while I'm working.

I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.

My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.

My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.

Freedom is a public library.

Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.