Quotes and clips from Paley herself.
“The writer is not some kind of phony historian who runs around answering everyone’s questions with made-up characters tying up loose ends. She is nothing but a questioner.”
“The Value of Not Understanding Everything,” mid-1960s
“Students are missing from these notes. They do most of the talking in class. They read their own work aloud in their own voices and discuss and disagree with one another. I do interrupt, interject any one of the preceding remarks or one of a dozen others, simply bossing my way into the discussion from time to time, because, after all, it’s my shop. To enlarge on these, I would need to keep a journal of conversations and events. This would be against my literary principles and pedagogical habits––all of which are subject to change.”
“Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken,” 1970
Is the problem of education really a problem of schooling? Isn’t there a class meaning in the assumption that a perfect school will produce the extraordinary person?
“Notes in Which Answers Are Questioned,” 1977
“I must admit I’m obsessed with the notion that the children of radicals belong in the public elementary-school system. There, they and their parents and teachers can take part in the great social struggle for sensible education for all the children. The school is the event: the school and its citizens are the education.”
“Notes in Which Answers Are Questioned,” 1977
“The writing program itself is the community of writers. It isn’t the teacher unless the teacher is very harmful. The tone the teacher sets, I guess, has a lot to do with it, but I think the important thing is that community of people. I wrote alone so long, and I’m telling you that not having people to share your stuff with is very hard and I think it holds you back.”
Interview for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, 1978
Do you have any person in mind to whom you’re telling?
“No, not really. Probably I have certain people in mind, but even if I didn’t, I’d still write to speak. I write aloud because I write for sound. I think that one of the problems for people writing is the separation between the spoken word and the written word.”
Interview for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, 1978
“By political I mean anything that speaks of relations of people inside a state, ordinary life and ordinary constrictions and problems.”
Interview for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, 1978
“…we’re all storytellers, every one of us, storytellers. From the time we’re very little, we come home and say to our mothers, “I want to tell you something!” That’s the first story. “I want to tell you something!””
Interview for Back Pages, 1986
“It’s not unusual for writers to be the children of foreigners. There’s something about the two languages engaging one another in the child’s ears that makes her want to write things down. She will want to say sentences over and over again, probably in the host or dominant tongue. There will also be a certain amount of syntactical confusion which, if not driven out of her head by heavy schooling, will free the writer to stand a sentence on its chauvinistic national head when necessary. She will then smile.”
“Language: On Clarice Lispector,” 1989
Terry Gross: You’ve been an activist all your life. Peace activist, anti-nuclear activist, but as an adult, I think some of your activist work started with the PTA, which, in some ways, would be a surprising place for peace activism to start.
Grace Paley: It’s true, but I think I had very strong pacifist leanings before that, but having children made me feel more so. I’ve always believed in working where I am. My children went to school so I just naturally began to work in my community, which was a village, and that was in the PTA. I really loved that period. I worked with parents, people like myself, in the same line of work: child rearing. Around that time, kids were being told that they had to hide under desks because they were about to be blown up or something like that, so I became very involved in that. My own daughter, I remember, as a very young child, refused to do that
Interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, 1992
“Anytime I speak in public, someone will get up and say, “You can’t teach writing.” What they mean is that you can teach grammar and spelling, but you can’t teach writing. They’re under the impression that you can teach math––the same people!––whereas writing is language, something you’ve been doing all your life, since you were a little tiny kid, right? So the idea of teaching writing: what does it mean, finally? For some people it meant that as a teacher you had to make great writers: either a student becomes a great writer or what’s the point in teaching writing? […] Our idea was that children––by writing, by putting down words, by reading, by beginning to love literature, by the inventiveness of listening to one another––could begin to understand the world better and begin to make a better world for themselves. That always seemed to me such a natural idea that I’ve never understood why it took so much aggressiveness and so much time to get it started.”
“Imagining the Present,” 1996
“This is what the imagination means to me: to know that this multiplicity of voices is a wonderful fact and that we’re lucky, especially the young people, to be living here at this time. My imagination tells me that if we let this present political climate defeat us, my children and my grandchildren will be in terrible trouble.”
“Imagining the Present,” 1996
“What you can say about voice is that it’s listening to other people. If you’re not interested in listening to other people, then go find another job. It’s not your voice that’s important at this point. You have to really care about others. I don’t mean you have to be sympathetic to everybody, but you have to be interested. Interested is a different thing. You have to be curious and interested about how people live. And even how they speak. That is really wonderful to listen to.
Interview for Juniper Institute, 2006
