American - Writer | December 11, 1922 - August 22, 2007
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Grace Paley
YouNothingBecomeNeedBecause
I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
RightSeeThroughThingsOften
I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
BelievePersonCivilizationMoreLot
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
MeIdeasBelieveEarlyKindOwn
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.
OpportunityRelationshipPeopleWorld
Poets take themselves very seriously.
SeriouslyTakePoetsThemselvesVery
What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.
TogetherPeopleStoryDoingEvents
'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. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.
SimpleMeStoryThinkYouSometimes
I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
PastThirtyWriteFictionAnyUntil
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.
PoetryMeWritingWorldSayingHelp
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.
PoetryMeWorldSpeakThinkWay
In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.
WritingThinkLanguageYouSometimes
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