Zitat des Tages von Grace Paley:
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
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.
I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
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.
Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
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.
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 was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Poets take themselves very seriously.
I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
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.
In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
