Quote

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

Grace Paley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Grace Paley
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 11
Died: 2007
Died: August 21
Activist
Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Writer
Else
Become
Nothing
Need
Needs
Writing

More quotes by Grace Paley

Image
To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Grace Paley
Image
If you're old and you're healthy and you're active - I don't mean you have to be politically active - if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.
Grace Paley
Image
No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
Grace Paley
Image
I don't have any degrees. I went to Hunter College one year and New York University another year. It's just on the basis of my books that I've been hired at any of the places I've been.
Grace Paley
Image
Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
Grace Paley
Image
If you want to do things, do things.
Grace Paley
Image
I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
Grace Paley
Image
I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
Grace Paley
Image
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
Image
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
Grace Paley
Image
The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
Grace Paley
Image
It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.
Grace Paley
Image
To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley
Image
Art's too long and life's too short.
Grace Paley
Image
I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
Grace Paley
Image
There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.
Grace Paley
Image
In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.
Grace Paley
Image
What we owe men is some freedom from their part in a murderous game in which they kick each other to death with one foot, bracing themselves on our various comfortable places with the other.
Grace Paley
Image
I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
Grace Paley
Image
I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.
Grace Paley