Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American short story writer, poet, teacher, and political activist. Read full biography of Grace Paley →
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.
If you want to do things, do things.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
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... →
That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along... →
'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.... →
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Poets take themselves very seriously.
What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
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.
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... →
Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American short story writer, poet, teacher, and political activist.