Paula Fox Quotes
When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.
The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.
Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.
The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.
People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.
we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.
It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.
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.
In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.
You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.
There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.
I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.
There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.
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.
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.
When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.
Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.
He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water.
