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But 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.

-Grace Paley

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But What's A Writer

Grace Paley

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But 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.

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More From Grace Paley

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.

I Often See Through Things Right To The Apparition Itself.

I Begin By Writing Paragraphs That Don’t Have An Immediate Relation To A Plot. The Sound Of The Story Comes First.

Hindsight, Usually Looked Down Upon, Is Probably As Valuable As Foresight, Since It Does Include A Few Facts.

In The Park I Met Other Women And I Started To Get Interested In Their Lives. I Developed A Lot Of Pressure To Talk About Women's Lives, And Children's Lives, Too. Children Interest Me Tremendously.

Art's Too Long And Life's Too Short.

This Hill Crossed With Broken Pines And Maples Lumpy With The Burial Mounds Of Uprooted Hemlocks (hurricane Of '38) Out Of Their Rotting Hearts Generations Rise Trying Once More To Become The Forest Just Beyond Them Tall Enough To Be Called Trees In Their Youth Like Aspen A Bouquet Of Young Beech Is Gathered They Still Wear Last Summer's Leaves The Lightest Brown Almost Translucent How Their Stubbornness Has Decorated The Winter Woods.

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.

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.

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.

Waves, Once They Land On The Beach, Are Not Reversible.

No Metaphor Reinvents The Job Of The Nurture Of Children Except To Muddy Or Mock.

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.

Well, By Now You Must Know Yourself, Honey, Whatever You Do, Life Don't Stop. It Only Sits A Minute And Dreams A Dream.

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.

If You Want To Do Things, Do Things.

Art Is Too Long, And Life Is Too Short.

Life Is Too Short

I Saw My Ex-husband In The Street. I Was Sitting On The Steps Of The New Library. Hello, My Life, I Said. We Had Once Been Married For Twenty-seven Years, So I Felt Justified. He Said, What? What Life? No Life Of Mine.

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.

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.

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.

Here I Am In The Garden Laughing An Old Woman With Heavy Breasts And A Nicely Mapped Face How Did This Happen Well That's Who I Wanted To Be At Last A Woman In The Old Style Sitting Stout Thighs Apart Under A Big Skirt Grandchild Sliding On Off My Lap A Pleasant Summer Perspiration That's My Old Man Across The Yard He's Talking To The Meter Reader He's Telling Him The World's Sad Story How Electricity Is Oil Or Uranium And So Forth I Tell My Grandson Run Over To Your Grandpa Ask Him To Sit Beside Me For A Minute I Am Suddenly Exhausted By My Desire To Kiss His Sweet Explaining Lips.

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.

Sometimes You Find That What Is Most Personal Is Also What Connects You Most Strongly With Others.

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.

I Might Write Four Lines Or I Might Write Twenty. I Subtract And I Add Until I Really Hit Something I Want To Do. You Don't Always Whittle Down, Sometimes You Whittle Up.

The Women's Movement Was Coming, But I Didn't Know It In 1956-1957, When I Began To Write.

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.

Paul Goodman Was Not Ahead Of His Time But In His Time.

My Language Limitations Here Are Real. My Vocabulary Is Adequate For Writing Notes And Keeping Journals But Absolutely Useless For An Active Moral Life. If I Really Knew This Language, There Would Surely Be In My Head, As There Is In Webster's Or The Dictionary Of American Slang, That Unreducible Verb Designed To Tell A Person Like Me What To Do Next.

There Is A Long Time In Me Between Knowing And Telling.

But 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.

Well, You Have Children So You Know: Little Children Little Troubles, Big Children, Big Troubles - It's A Saying In Yiddish. Maybe The Chinese Said It Too.

You Become A Writer Because You Need To Become A Writer - Nothing Else.

I Was A Fantastic Student Until Ten, And Then My Mind Began To Wander.

Let Us Go Forth With Fear And Courage And Rage To Save The World.

The Word Career Is A Divisive Word. It's A Word That Divides The Normal Life From Business Or Professional Life.

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.

Everyone, Real Or Invented, Deserves The Open Destiny Of Life.

When You Think Of Things That Influenced Your Life, Mother Goose Influenced More People Than Almost Any Other Thing, The Rhythms Of Those Poems. Everything After That Was A Bare Imitation Of Some Of Those Mysterious And Materialistic Poems.

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.

If You're Feminist, It Means That You've Noticed That Male Ownership Of The Direction Of Female Lives Has Been The Order Of The Day For A Few Thousand Years, And It Isn't Natural.

When I Was About Twenty-one, I Published A Few Poems. Maybe I Wrote A Couple Of Stories Before, But I Really Began To Write Stories In My Mid-thirties. My Kids Were Still Little, And They Were In School And Day Care, And I Had Begun To Think A Lot About Wanting To Tell Some Stories And Not Being Able To Do It In Poetry.

I Didn't Intend. The Word "intend" Is The Wrong Word For What I Do. It's Just That It's Something You Do, And You Can't Not Do. If You Want To Do It, And You Don't Intend To, You Do It Anyway. The Word "intend" Is Wrong. The Word "pressure" Is Right. It's Like Any Art Form.

I'm Really Sorry For People Growing Up Right Now, Because They Have Some Cockeyed Idea That They Can Get By With Their Eyes Closed; The Cane They're Tapping Is Money, And That Won't Take Them In The Right Direction.

It's A Terrible Thing To Die Young. Still, It Saves A Lot Of Time.

A Joke Is Necessary At This Time.

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.

I Liked The Education. I Liked People Learning Things All Around Me And I Liked Going To People's Classes.

In The End, Long Life Is The Reward, Strength, And Beauty.

All That Is Really Necessary For Survival Of The Fittest, It Seems, Is An Interest In Life, Good, Bad Or Peculiar.

My Family Were Russian Jews. They Got You To Read As Soon As You Could. And Then Assumed You Would Read A Lot. People Didn't Really Tell Stories But They Were Good Talkers. That's Important For A Writer, To Hear Speakers.

I Don't Believe Civilization Can Do A Lot More Than Educate A Person's Senses.

Rosiness Is Not A Worse Windowpane Than Gloomy Gray When Viewing The World.

There Isn't A Story Written That Isn't About Blood And Money. People And Their Relationship To Each Other Is The Blood, The Family. And How They Live, The Money Of It.

Just When I Most Needed Important Conversation, A Sniff Of The Man-wide World, That Is, At Least One Brainy Companion Who Could Translate My Friendly Language Into His Tongue Of Undying Carnal Love, I Was Forced To Lounge In Our Neighborhood Park, Surrounded By Children.

I Didn't Write Any Fiction Until I Was Past Thirty.

Write From What You Know Into What You Don't Know.

…i Go Through A Story For Lies. I Might Discover The Lie Of Trying To Show Off. Sometimes They’re Lies Of Character. Sometimes They Are Lies Of Writing The Most Beautiful Sentence In The World That Has Nothing To Do With The Story.

Most Of The Womens Libbers I Knew Really Didnt Want To Have A Piece Of The Mens Pie. They Thought That Pie Was Kind Of Poisonous, Toxic, Really Full Of Weapons, Poison Gases, All Kinds Of Mean Junk We Didnt Even Want A Slice Of.

What We Owe Men Is Some Freedom From Their Part In A Murderous Game In Which They Kick Each Other To Death With One Foot, Bracing Themselves On Our Various Comfortable Places With The Other.

To Translate A Poem From Thinking Into English Takes All Night.

Sometimes Before People Know What They're Saying, They Already Love The Language.

I've Started Many Novels, And They All Ended On Page Seven.

I Believe In A Kind Of Fidelity To Your Own Early Ideas; It's A Kind Of Antagonism In Me To Prevailing Fads.

My Vocabulary Is Adequate For Writing Notes And Keeping Journals But Absolutely Useless For An Active Moral Life.

I Am Very Interested In People Trying To Write Because I Don't Have A Big Academic Background At All.

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.

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.

I Read A Lot. I Liked A Tremendous Number Of Poets And Writers. The Person Whose Work I Liked The Most Was Joyce.

I Didn't Intend To Become A Short-story Writer. I Became One Because I Finished A Couple Of Short Stories And Realized That's What I Wanted To Do And Could Do With Children And With All The Other Things In My Life.

Old Age Is Another Country, A Place Of Strangeness, Sometimes, And Dislocation. There's A Lot To Be Done In This Country, And A Great Deal Of Pleasure There. There Are Friends, Some Of Whom Are Sick And Needful Of You, As You Will Be Of Them Someday. The World Itself Is Very Beautiful. It's A Place Where You Have A Lot To Do. But You Have To Do It Knowing That Sometimes You Will Be Afraid Of This New Country.

We Write About What We Don't Know About What We Know.

Sometimes, Walking With A Friend, I Forget The World.

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.

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