Quote

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

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Grace Paley
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 11
Died: 2007
Died: August 21
Activist
Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Like
Sitting
Dope
Lying
Chair
Around
Hanging
Seems
Chairs
Writing
Basic
Work
Bed
Time
Essential
Indolence
Thinking
Essentials
Daydreaming

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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.
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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.
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I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
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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.
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I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.
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People will sometimes say, Why don't you write more politics? And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.
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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.
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Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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.
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