Grace Paley Quotes

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

I'm one of the writers that would die if I didn't say what I needed to say. For me, it's a matter of survival to write.

A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

Even if I couldn't get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there's a better school for would-be novelists, I don't know what it is.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

I keep writing because it is deeply pleasurable to me.

Writing doesn't leave much time for hobbies, unless you consider that I began writing as a hobby and have made the hobby into a profession.

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.

I feel a burden if I don't write.

I never want kids to walk away after a school presentation and say, 'I met a writer today.' I want them to say, 'I am a writer.'

No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way.

My mother always told me if you write about life, you will always be in the game. Just don't write songs... write life. I decided to take her up on that.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.

I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.

The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money.

If I don't feel like writing today or for a few days, I don't. And I don't think about it. It is not an obligation-it is the greatest privilege.

I don't know if I had ever found my place in the world until I fully committed to being a writer.

More than anything, that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.