Grace Paley Quotes

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.

Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.

I'm a writer, not an editor, and though the editing rarely cut into my writing time, it did take away from that walking-around-thinking-about-it-when-you're-not-thinking-about-it time that I think is important for writers. When you're half-thinking about what you're working on while driving, cooking . . . just letting things sift and settle, come to you.

I used to get my best ideas from being bored, and now, if I even think I'm being faintly bored, I have two million Twitter followers I can engage with. It's great, but I also think it's important to be able to let your thoughts flow and percolate.

Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries.

I like to laze around. I think that's a huge part of creativity. You have to let your mind relax and then another part of your brain suddenly connects with the solution you're trying to find.

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.

My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.

Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.

I hibernate. I hibernate until the next project takes shape in my mind.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.

I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic!

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

I'm very, very lazy. I love to sit in a chair and look out the window and do nothing.

After putting the kids to bed, I would think about what I wanted to write.

When I make a film, I don't watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away... I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I'll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything.

I get a lot of ideas sitting in the living room staring at the walls or lying in bed thinking about things.

I invariably do some of my best thinking on Saturdays.

I think one of the most important things for creativity is boredom.

I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you.

It is generally recognized that creativity requires leisure, an absence of rush, time for the mind and imagination to float and wander and roam, time for the individual to descend into the depths of his or her psyche, to be available to barely audible signals rustling for attention. Long periods of time may pass in which nothing seems to be happening. But we know that kind of space must be created if the mind is to leap out of its accustomed ruts, to part from the mechanical, the known, the familiar, the standard, and generate a leap into the new.

Daydreaming with pencil and paper is a respectable form of meditation.

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.