Top 100 Paley's Quotes
#1. 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.
Grace Paley
#2. Let her live in the air,' said Peter. 'I bet you do. Let her love her body.'
'Let her,' said Anna sadly.
Grace Paley
#3. If I miss anything, it's being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.
Grace Paley
#4. You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Grace Paley
#5. I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.
Grace Paley
#6. I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.
Grace Paley
#7. The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
Grace Paley
#8. I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
Grace Paley
#9. Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
#10. Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose, bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous pneumonia - something I have never heard of - if my hand had not got hold of a glass ashtray and, entirely apart from my personal decision, flung it.
Grace Paley
#11. Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."
Andre Dubus
#12. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
Grace Paley
#13. I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.
Nell Freudenberger
#14. You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it ... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
Grace Paley
#15. Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
Grace Paley
#16. I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Grace Paley
#17. I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
Grace Paley
#18. What we are doing is satisfying the American public. That's our job. I always say we have to give most of the people what they want most of the time. That's what they expect from us.
William S. Paley
#19. The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.
Grace Paley
#20. I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
Grace Paley
#22. When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.
Grace Paley
#23. A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.
Grace Paley
#24. I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
Grace Paley
#25. In what way can a revelation be made but by miracles? In none which we are able to conceive.
William S. Paley
#26. Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.
Grace Paley
#27. There's a certain amount of disorder that has to be reorganized.
William Paley
#28. I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.
Grace Paley
#29. I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.
Grace Paley
#31. Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.
Grace Paley
#32. When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.
Grace Paley
#33. Andy Paley got us a show opening for his band at an outdoor show at Simmon's College, on a Friday.
Jonathan Richman
#34. 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.
Grace Paley
#35. What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.
William S. Paley
#36. Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.
Grace Paley
#37. He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry attacks democracy itself.
William S. Paley
#38. White lies always introduce others of a darker complexion.
William S. Paley
#39. The men don't like their wives so much. They only get married if it's a good idea." Faith
Grace Paley
#40. My life is too short to focus on legislation when I could be making art. So I'm not a copyright reformer, I'm a copyright abolitionist.
Nina Paley
#41. I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then - the ones that are still alive. That's one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships ... and also a few enmities.
Grace Paley
#43. Oh no," she says. Soft because I am the older one, but very strong. (I've noticed it. All of a sudden they look at you, and then it comes to them, young people, they are bound to outlast you, so they temper up their icy steel and stare into about an inch away from you a lot. Have you noticed it?) At
Grace Paley
#44. 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.
Grace Paley
#45. Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.
Grace Paley
#46. 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.
Grace Paley
#47. 'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.
Grace Paley
#48. If you're feminist, it means that you've noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn't natural.
Grace Paley
#49. My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.
Grace Paley
#50. 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.
Grace Paley
#51. What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
Grace Paley
#52. I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Grace Paley
#53. Happy!" He leaned over the rail and tried to hold her eyes. But that is hard to do, for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out of a bad spot.
"Faith in the Afternoon
Grace Paley
#54. In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
Grace Paley
#56. ... I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they're lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.
Grace Paley
#57. 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.
Grace Paley
#58. I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
Grace Paley
#59. I have seldom known a person who deserted the truth in trifles and then could be trusted in matters of importance.
Babe Paley
#60. No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
Grace Paley
#61. 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.
Grace Paley
#62. It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
Grace Paley
#63. Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
Grace Paley
#64. Babe Paley simply never made an empty gesture, and here she was, assembling a parade of them. But her feet, her hands, her mind, her heart, were all restless. Truman.
Melanie Benjamin
#66. Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
Grace Paley
#67. 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.
Grace Paley
#68. I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
Grace Paley
#69. 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.
Grace Paley
#70. I'm still one of those persons who prefers to wear pants, especially for at-home entertaining.
Babe Paley
#71. I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned.
Grace Paley
#72. Is not about creating an object. It is about creating a perspective.
Albert Paley
#73. The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
Grace Paley
#74. Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.
Grace Paley
#75. God has been pleased to prescribe limits to his power and to work out his ends within these limits.
William S. Paley
#76. 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.
Grace Paley
#77. I'm seventy-five now. I also have the peculiar luck of having a sister and brother who are fourteen and sixteen years older than me. Their health is not good. It couldn't be at that age. But their spirits are. Both my brother and my sister are an example to me.
Grace Paley
#78. Bill Paley is not only the greatest boss I ever had, but he's the most brilliant, honest and warm human being I've ever met. And I'll say that to his face - even if it costs me my job.
Jack Benny
#79. I begin by writing paragraphs that don't have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
Grace Paley
#80. (For the uninitiated, "ectoplasm" is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins's writings on religion.)
Edward Feser
#81. Party of the Century by Deborah Davis, about Truman Capote's famous Black and White Ball. Capote by Gerald Clarke. Truman Capote by George Plimpton. Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson. Slim, the memoir of Slim Keith. And The Sisters by David Grafton, about Babe Paley and her sisters.
Melanie Benjamin
#82. There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.
Grace Paley
#83. Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.
Grace Paley
#84. Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
Grace Paley
#85. The look of being too deliberately dressed, with everything cautiously matching, always bores me.
Babe Paley
#86. My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.
Grace Paley
#88. In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.
Grace Paley
#89. I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.
David Friedman
#90. I like the sudden shock of non-sequitur color. Color, in fact, is my weakness.
Babe Paley
#91. Television, I would say,
isn't an advertising medium.
It's a selling medium.
William S. Paley
#92. As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.
Grace Paley
#93. In a way he was lucky. He was a member of a generation that thought it
was a good, even joyous, political idea to put its brains, energy,
labor at the service of the people.
Grace Paley
#94. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Grace Paley
#95. A lot of sad things have happened to my friends' children, people you knew as babies. They've been killed or become crazy or all kinds of tragic things. There are some people whose children haven't talked to them in fifteen years. There's all kind of meshugaas in this world.
Grace Paley
#96. But what's a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads-writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that's all.
Grace Paley
#97. Women should stick together. Didn't you learn anything yet?
Grace Paley
#98. Who cares?' said Judy, who didn't care.
Grace Paley
#99. 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.
Grace Paley
#100. 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.
Grace Paley
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