I need to stay as ignorant in the art of teaching as I want them to remain in the art of literature. The assignments I give are usually assignments I… - Grace Paley

I don't see television the way most people do. I see it as a destroyer of concentration rather than of language. There's dead language everywhere. We're cut off from the truth of our tongues. (1980)

Human beings come from several million years of development, which is quite wonderful. I have a lot of regard for what human beings have become. It took us a million years to learn how to speak to each other, and we did it. It took us another million years to work with each other, and we did it. I think the human race is remarkable…Until we live in a world where we stop abusing each other and the other creatures, we will not have reached our perfection.

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)