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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.

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
Stretch
Voices
Writer
Voice
Jobs
Believe
Really

More quotes by Grace Paley

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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.
Grace Paley
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Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
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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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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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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.
Grace Paley
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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
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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.
Grace Paley
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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
Grace Paley
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Grace Paley
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I did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.
Grace Paley
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I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
Grace Paley
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The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
Grace Paley
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Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
Grace Paley
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My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.
Grace Paley
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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.
Grace Paley