51 quotes
Writers often write about what they want to read or haven’t seen written.
with The Paris Review (1992)
The elderly woman's husband said, What is in his mind? He thinks because he was once a poor boy in a poor country and he became very rich with a beautiful wife, he thinks he can bend steel with his teeth.
I have to say that war is man-made. It's made by men. It's their thing, it's their world, and they're terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it's made by men. How do they come to live this way?
Of Poetry and Women and the World (1986)
In no time at all his cheerful face appeared at the door of the spring dusk. In the street among peaceable strangers he did a handstand. Then easy and impervious, in full control, he cartwheeled eastward into the source of night.
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
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.
I think that’s what literature is about; it’s the struggle for truth. It’s the struggle for what you don’t understand
with Poets & Writers (2008)
Well, a wish, some wish, Ruth said. Well, I wished that this world wouldn’t end. This world, this world, Ruth said softly.
There’s hardly a woman writer who doesn’t receive some kind of support from the women’s movement. We’re very lucky to be living and writing now.
with The Paris Review (1992)
Russian is very dear to me because it’s a family language, but I am Jewish-Russian, which is a little different from Russian-Russian. My family ran away in 1905 from the Russian-Russians.
with The Paris Review (1992)
You can't talk about anything without bringing in the world. It's out there.
In The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology (1985)
sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world.
Midrash on happiness (1990)
No, George said, you don’t understand. The pinball machine--any pinball machine you play in any penny arcade--is so remarkable, so fine, so shrewdly threaded. It is already beautiful in necessity and sufficiency of wire, connection, possibility.
My last girl was Jewish, which is often a warm kind of girl, concerned about food intake and employability. They don't like you to work too hard, I understand, until you're hooked and then, you bastard, sweat!
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother’s foreign garden.
these old time immigrants are not standing up enough for the newer immigrants—the Latino people who have been coming across the Mexican border and others.
with Poets & Writers (2008)
Two good books to read: A Life Full of Holes, Charhadi/I Work Like a Gardener, Joan Miró
Some Notes on Teaching (1970)
If you I live long enough you really become patient. People improve. If they're already wonderful, they become slowly more wonderful.
In The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology (1985)
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.
with Boston Review (1976)
In 1959 it was absolutely insane for Ken McCormick to say, yes, he was going to publish a book of short stories. Now everybody in the writing world is reading and writing short stories.
with The Paris Review (1992)
People's imagination has been changed a lot by television. (1980)
Conversations with Grace Paley (1978)