Paula Fox
Paula Fox
Paula Foxis an American writer of novels for adults and children and of two memoirs. For her contributions as a children's writer she won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978, the highest international recognition for a creator of children's books. She has also won several awards for particular children's books including the 1974 Newbery Medal for her novel The Slave Dancer; a 1983 National Book Award in category Children's Fictionfor A Place Apart; and the 2008 Deutscher...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMemoirist
Date of Birth22 April 1923
CountryUnited States of America
People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.
Teachers inspire the smallest hearts to grow big enough to change the world.
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.
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.
A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.
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.
Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.
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.