She remembered that he was a person who had killed. - Grace Paley

Someone like Mary Daly doesn't even know how people live-but other women, I think they come from suburban lives or something like that, and no family. That's a certain kind of life but it's not general female life. (1981)

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. 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. (1978 interview)

everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth's nation-states-hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all.