Grace Paley Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.”

“I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.”

“Poets take themselves very seriously.”

“Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.”

“What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.”

“I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.”

“In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.”

“What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.”