Happy birthday, Grace Paley! Here are some quotes from the writer:
“Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.”
“You know, the mind is an astonishing, long living, erotic thing.”
“Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.”
“[R]emembering is organized for significance (not usefulness).”
“When you find only yourself interesting, you’re boring. When I find only myself interesting, I’m a conceited bore. When I’m interested in you, I’m interesting.”
“I think that any life that’s interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it.”
“Don’t you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I’m sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language, though the subject, which is how to save the world—and quickly—is immense.”
“When you find only yourself interesting, you’re boring. When I find only myself interesting, I’m a conceited bore. When I’m interested in you, I’m interesting.”
“The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.”
“Plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
“Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”
“You become a writer because you need to become a writer—nothing else.”
“The only recognizable feature of hope is action.”
“I need to stay as ignorant in the art of teaching as I want them to remain in the art of literature. The assignments I give are usually assignments I’ve given myself, problems that have defeated me, investigations I’m still pursuing.”
“Literature has something to do with language. There’s probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you’ll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren’t a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of school-teachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage.”
“A first assignment: to be repeated whenever necessary, by me or the class. Write a story, a first-person narrative in the voice of someone with whom you’re in conflict. Someone who disturbs you, worries you, someone you don’t understand. Use a situation you don’t understand.”
“No personal journals, please, for about a year. Why? Boring to me. When you find only yourself interesting, you’re boring. When I find only myself interesting, I’m a conceited bore. When I’m interested in you, I’m interesting.
“Stay open and ignorant.”
“Don’t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm X.”
“When I came to think as a writer, it was because I had begun to live among women.”
“[L]iterature […] really comes, not from knowing so much, but from not knowing. It comes from what you’re curious about. It comes from what obsesses you. It comes from what you want to know.”
“[N]o matter what you feel about what you’re doing, if that is really what you’re looking for, if that is really what you’re trying to understand, if that is really what you’re stupid about, if that’s what you’re dumb about and you’re trying to understand it, stay with it, no matter what, and you’ll at least live your own truth or be hung for it.”
“One of the things that art is about, for me, is justice. Now, that isn’t a matter of opinion, really. That isn’t to say, ‘I’m going to show these people right or wrong’ or whatever. But what art is about—and this is what justice is about, although you’ll have your own interpretations—is the illumination of what isn’t known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden. And I think people feel like that who are beginning to write.”
“We were accused of having been doomstruck the other day. And in a way we should be, why shouldn’t we be? Things are rotten. I’m sixty-one and three-quarters years old and I’ve seen terrible times during the Depression, and I do think the life of the people was worse during the McCarthy period. I just want to throw that in extra. That is to say the everyday life, the fearful life, of Americans was harder in that time than this. But the objective facts of world events right now are worse than at any other time. And we all know that, we can’t deny it, and it’s also true that it’s very hard to look in the faces of our children, and terrifying to look into the faces of our grandchildren. And I cannot look at my granddaughter’s face, really, without shading my eyes a little bit and saying, ‘Well, listen, Grandma’s not going to let that happen.’ But we have to face it, and they have to face it, just as we had to face what was much less frightening.”
“Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.”
“When people say, ‘What can poets do?’ I often say, ‘Just what any other working group could do to get anything accomplished, and that is to organize.'”
“That’s the thing about writing. You can bring a lot of stuff together.”
“For me, somehow, the short story is very close to the poem in feeling and not so close in feeling to the novel, although it’s about the same people that a novel would be about.”
“You can only teach learners. You can’t teach any subject to anybody who isn’t there to want to know.”
“I write about things I don’t know all that well just to try and understand them. The act of writing is an investigative, learning act.”
“I think all art, all these stories that people write, happen when two amazing facts come together in some way, or two amazing events, or two amazing winds, or whatever it is, come and the surprise of this meeting is the story.”
“Children’s writing is so often so beautiful, because it’s so close to their own true tongues. On the other hand, it’s very boring because they have no experience in life.”
“I think most people are heroic to a degree, they’re heroic in caring for the lives of the people around them and not dumping each other or dumping on each other.”
“If you don’t think history, you’re not thinking. You’re just not thinking if you cannot see a generation back. And if you do not think about the circumstances in their lives, then you don’t know what you’re thinking about. There’s no truth in the present moment. Now simply doesn’t exist without then at all.”
“If you I live long enough, you really become patient. People improve. If they’re already wonderful, they become slowly more wonderful.”
“You can’t talk about anything without bringing in the world. It’s out there.”
“Writers often write about what they want to read or haven’t seen written.”
“There’s always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something…”
“A lot of them (my stories) begin with a sentence—they all begin with language…Very often one sentence is absolutely resonant…The sound of the story comes first.”
“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. I think men can write about women and women can write about men. The whole point is to know the facts. Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.”
“I read poetry all the time. Probably the poets everybody read then. Very catholic taste. I even loved Eliot then whom I later grew not to love. I knew lots of poems by memory and walked around mumbling them. Yeats, Rilke, Keats, Coleridge. I liked Milton a lot, for some reason. And then there were the Oscar Williams anthologies of 1942 and 1943 with those pictures of the beautiful young poets.”
“I will say I knew I wanted to write about women and children, but I put it off for a couple of years because I thought, People will think this is trivial, nothing. Then I thought, It’s what I have to write. It’s what I want to read. And I don’t see it out there.”
“The outside world will trivialize you for almost anything if it wants to. You may as well be who you are.”
“You can’t write without a lot of pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from anger, which then changes into a pressure to write…The pressure from anger is an energy that can be violent or useful or useless. Also the pressure doesn’t have to be anger. It could be love. One could be overcome with feelings of lifetime love or justice.”
“I hate the American expectation of violence. I’m not going to play into any of that. When I must write about violence, I will, but I’ll do it straight, not add and add because the level is higher every year.”
“Art comes from constant mental harassment.”
“The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”
“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 world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.”
“I write all the time, in a way. I’m not a very disciplined person. I write. I wrote yesterday, a little. Writing is a habit, among other things, and if you’re a writer, you’d better get into the habit. A lot of people don’t realize that. When I’m writing a story then I’m really writing all the time, wholly involved in it. When I’m not writing a story, I’m still thinking….Susan Sontag once said that she can’t wait to get to a typewriter so she’ll know what she thinks! And that’s true for most writers, that you really have gotten this habit of thinking on paper. Until you do that all you have is a lot of junk in your head, a lot of stuff swirling around, and the paper is the place where you really begin to think.”
“I don’t see television the way most people do. I see it as a destroyer of concentration rather than of language. There’s dead language everywhere. We’re cut off from the truth of our tongues.”
“All the arts feed each other.”
“I think a lot of what influences a writer is what you hear in the street, the language you hear, the way people talk, the way, the rhythms, the song, the language of your childhood.”
“The world may not last.”
“I think people have writer’s block because they don’t really write things down. Their minds are too linear. You have blocks when either you have nothing to write about or you are just going dead ahead. If you just write, if you realize what your mind is and that it’s always working, you’re always wondering, you’re always curious, you’re always thinking about things.”
“All of art is political; if a writer says this is not political, it’s probably the most political thing that he could be doing. That’s a statement of an alienation problem. I would say that my interest in ordinary life and how people live is a very political one. That’s politics; that’s what it is.”
“I always think that the writer’s role is to get off her or his ass and to get on the street and do something. But that answer does not satisfy people. But to me that’s a very important thing.”
“I’m a writer but I’m also a person in the world. I don’t feel a terrible obligation to write a lot of books.”
“I can’t see me writing an autobiography. I mean it seems so stupid. You have to feel like you are telling the world something. I feel I’m doing it when I write the way I write.”
“Don’t live with anybody who doesn’t support your work. Very important. And read a lot. Don’t be afraid to read or of being influenced by what you read. You’re more influenced by the voice of childhood than you are by some poet you’re reading. The last piece of advice is to keep a paper and pencil in your pocket at all times, especially if you’re a poet. But even if you’re a prose writer, you have to write things down when they come to you, or you lose them, and they’re gone forever. Of course, most of them are stupid, so it doesn’t matter. But in case they’re the thing that solves the problem for the story or the poem or whatever, you’d better keep a pencil and a paper in your pocket.”
“I think that’s what literature is about; it’s the struggle for truth. It’s the struggle for what you don’t understand.”
“If you look out that window, it’s so amazing, and the countryside is being murdered. People don’t understand what is being done to their countryside. In some parts of the world, they seem to understand it better than here. Here we don’t seem to get it that the fields are being wrecked by poisons and the air is close to the end of breathable. There is a great effort in America to stay happy and not worry and not understand and not do anything about it.”
“I want people to look at the world and see what’s happening to it and take some action. This planet is so lovable. It is so various and so lovable, including all sorts of parts of the world that I’ve never seen, and I’ve seen more than most people. Just in what your eyes see, and how people live on the earth, it’s amazing, but it’s going to end if we don’t get our leaders to pay attention.”
“Human beings come from several million years of development, which is quite wonderful. I have a lot of regard for what human beings have become. It took us a million years to learn how to speak to each other, and we did it. It took us another million years to work with each other, and we did it. I think the human race is remarkable…Until we live in a world where we stop abusing each other and the other creatures, we will not have reached our perfection.”
