Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.
Grace Paley
Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.
Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.
That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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.
I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.
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.
A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.
I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
Poets take themselves very seriously.
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.
I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
If you want to do things, do things.
