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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
Didn
Past
Writing
Thirty
Fiction
Write

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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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I'm really sorry for people growing up right now, because they have some cockeyed idea that they can get by with their eyes closed the cane they're tapping is money, and that won't take them in the right direction.
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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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To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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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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The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
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Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.
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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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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.
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I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
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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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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
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Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
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Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
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To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
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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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Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.
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