Grace Paley, née Goodside (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist. (wikipedia)
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.
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.
What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.
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.
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.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.
I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
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.