Paula Fox Quotes

#1. I don't like to listen to music while I'm working.

Paula Fox

#2. Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

Paula Fox

#3. If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog - you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.

Paula Fox

#4. When there's a terrible murder people who are interviewed say, 'This has always been a quiet neighborhood.' That is so dumb and uninformed! The earth is not a quiet neighborhood. There isn't anyplace that's a quiet neighborhood. People are asking themselves how to stay neat in the cyclone.

Paula Fox

#5. There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

Paula Fox

#6. My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.

Paula Fox

#7. There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

Paula Fox

#8. When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Paula Fox

#9. He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water.

Paula Fox

#10. The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don't know when that one-day will be. So please, tell the people you love and care for that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late.

Paula Fox

#11. We are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.

Paula Fox

#12. The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.

Paula Fox

#13. You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

Paula Fox

#14. I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

Paula Fox

#15. Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.

Paula Fox

#16. My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth.

Paula Fox

#17. My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.

Paula Fox

#18. Words are nets through which all truth escapes
("News From The World")

Paula Fox

#19. When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

Paula Fox

#20. I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

Paula Fox

#21. Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

Paula Fox

#22. Freedom is a public library.

Paula Fox

#23. Teachers inspire the smallest hearts to grow big enough to change the world.

Paula Fox

#24. The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.

Paula Fox

#25. A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.

Paula Fox

#26. How pleasant to read uncompromised by purpose.

Paula Fox

#27. I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.

Paula Fox

#28. In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

Paula Fox

#29. I've done a Russian movie," Claire said. "Thank God they're still stuck in realism, Zola-crazy. Subtitling their films is like captioning a child's picture book.

Paula Fox

#30. I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

Paula Fox

#31. What is there to imagine with a gun?" asked Papa . . . .
"Something dead," Papa said more quietly. "That's what there is to imagine with a gun.

Paula Fox

#32. I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.

Paula Fox

#33. A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

Paula Fox

#34. She'd been noticing the feet of colored people ever since she'd come south. "They've been pressed down to the earth so hard," she said. "And the weight of what they carry tortures their feet.

Paula Fox

#35. There was nothing to imagine with a gun except something that was dead.

Paula Fox

#36. Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.

Paula Fox

#37. When he sat on the Makepeace veranda, it was as if he'd gone to another country

Paula Fox

#38. I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.

Paula Fox

#39. It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking - when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.

Paula Fox

#40. People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

Paula Fox

#41. Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

Paula Fox

#42. The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.

Paula Fox