GRACE PALEY

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

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

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.

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.

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.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

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

If you want to do things, do things.

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

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.

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.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

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

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

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.

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.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

'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.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.