Grace Paley
Grace Paley
Grace Paleywas an American short story writer, poet, teacher, and political activist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth11 December 1922
CountryUnited States of America
people important stories
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.
writing plot stories
I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
lying stories wrong-words
The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.
blood people stories
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.
saws stories obligation
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.
couple children stories
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.
book writing stories
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.
accurate becomes definition developed less moves poetry speaking
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.
felt lived poetry saying
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.
anybody class generally interested work
What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
average education goes good people start trouble turns work
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.
opportunity people relationship
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.
people
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
dreams life minute whatever
Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.