Grace Paley Quotes

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

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

A joke is necessary at this time.

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

I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

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.

As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.

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

No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

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.

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.

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

Art is too long, and life is too short.

Old age is not a good thing. It can be really hard, and those of us who have it a little easier should keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not as well off.

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

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

‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.

The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.

Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)

We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.