Grace Paley Quotes

In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I've always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

I became an author because I love words. I enjoyed playing with them when I was a kid, writing stories and plays, and doing whatever I could think to do with words. I kept my love of them growing up and still love to see what they can do.

I always got good grades in creative writing from elementary school on up.

Getting to share the stories in my head with other people and have them enjoy those stories, and having them come to see my characters as real. That's so cool.

Reading taught me how to write.

If you sing beautifully about nothing, no one will listen. If you sing badly about great stuff, no one will listen. Ideas are everywhere, but my theory is that a writer doesn't just think of an idea: they perform them.

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

The only thing I know anything about are my own fantasies and anxieties. I don't trust my eyes. I consider myself to be a short-story writer.

I think every fiction writer, to a certain extent, is a schizophrenic and able to have two or three or five voices in his or her body. We seek, through our profession, to get those voices onto paper.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.

Writing is definitely something that interests me a lot.

I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I'm done is write another one. Then I don't feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away.

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.

I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.

I never thought it was unusual to write, and I've been writing or pretending to write since before I even started school.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.