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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
Fiction
Write
Didn
Past
Writing
Thirty

More quotes by Grace Paley

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I didn't intend. The word intend is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word intend is wrong. The word pressure is right. It's like any art form.
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You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
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A joke is necessary at this time.
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Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
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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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I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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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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Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
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I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
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Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
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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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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 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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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.
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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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In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
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It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
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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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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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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.
Grace Paley