About Grace Paley: Grace Paley was an American short story writer, poet, teacher, and political activist.
'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 ...
I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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.
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.
If you want to do things, do things.
The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'Wh...
Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
