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I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

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
Thirty
Fiction
Write
Didn
Past
Writing

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The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
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We write about what we don't know about what we know.
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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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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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I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
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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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A joke is necessary at this time.
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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
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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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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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Art's too long and life's too short.
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That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
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I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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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.
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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.
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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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