Latest Grace Paley Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  People, Political, Movement

• I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.

  Grace Paley

  Should Have, Political, Periods

• I did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful.

  Grace Paley

  Writing, Numbers, Omission

• To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.

  Grace Paley

  Mean, Modest

• I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.

  Grace Paley

  Writing, Should Have, Done

• If you're old and you're healthy and you're active - I don't mean you have to be politically active - if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.

  Grace Paley

  Mean, People, Healthy

• Old age is not a good thing. It can be really hard, and those of us who have it a little easier should keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not as well off.

  Grace Paley

  People, Mind, Age

• 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

  Brother, Years, Luck

• 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

  Baby, Children, Crazy

• People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.

  Grace Paley

  Father, Kids, Eye

• 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

  Stories, Saws, Obligation

• I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

  Grace Paley

  Reading, Literature, University

• 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

  New York, Book, College

• I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.

  Grace Paley

  Class, People

• I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

  Grace Paley

  Writing, People, Trying

• Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

  Grace Paley

  People, Language, Sometimes

• 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

  Jobs, Writing, People

• It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.

  Grace Paley

  Cities, People, Water

• I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

  Grace Paley

  Jobs, Believe, Voice

• 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

  New York, Talking, Cities

• I was fortunate that by the time I was born, there were a lot of comforts and at the same time I lived in a neighborhood where it was brought to my eyes every single day that people didn't live like me. Every day I knew that many of my friends "got relief." That was important in my thinking about the world, thinking that not everybody lived that way.

  Grace Paley

  Eye, Thinking, People

• 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

  Country, War, America

• I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.

  Grace Paley

  Christian, Doors, House

• The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

  Grace Paley

  Writing, Movement, Knows

• My mother went to demonstrations. I remember her going to a big demonstration for Earl Brower and she came home crying and said the Communists were very mean and booed their people. I remember feeling sad at her feeling sad.

  Grace Paley

  Mother, Home, Mean