Quotes by Paula Fox

About Paula Fox:

Paula Fox is an American writer of novels for adults and children and of two memoirs. For her contributions as a children's writer she won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978, the highest international recognition for a creator of children's books. She has also won several awards for particular children's books including the 1974 Newbery Medal for her novel The Slave Dancer; a 1983 National Book Award in category Children's Fiction (paperback) for A Place Apart; and the 2008 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for A Portrait of Ivan (1969) in its German-language edition Ein Bild von Ivan.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water.

Paula Fox

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

Paula Fox

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

Paula Fox

My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.

Paula Fox

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

Paula Fox

I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.

Paula Fox

My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.

Paula Fox

I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.

Paula Fox

I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.

Paula Fox

I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

Paula Fox

There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

Paula Fox

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Paula Fox

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

Paula Fox

I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

Paula Fox

I don't like to listen to music while I'm working.

Paula Fox

Author Bio

  • NamePaula Fox
  • Descriptionbook author
  • BornApril 22, 1923
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Children's Writer
  • WorksThe Slave Dancer
  • AwardsNewbery Medal; Hans Christian Andersen Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Zilveren Griffel