Paula Fox Quotes
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I don't like to listen to music while I'm working.
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A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.
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My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth.
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I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.
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A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité.
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In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.
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My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.
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When there's a terrible murder people who are interviewed say, 'This has always been a quiet neighborhood.' That is so dumb and uninformed! The earth is not a quiet neighborhood. There isn't anyplace that's a quiet neighborhood. People are asking themselves how to stay neat in the cyclone.
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I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.
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To be human is to be in a story.
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The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don't know when that one-day will be. So please, tell the people you love and care for that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late.
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I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.
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Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.
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It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.
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You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.
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When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.
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The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.
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There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.
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I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.
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Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.
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I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.
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Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.
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When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.
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There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.
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The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.
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Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.
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Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.
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When I had a few francs, I spent them at a café on the Place de Longchamps, a block or so from my pension, where I could order a glass of Beaujolais and a plate of string beans in vinaigrette for the equivalent of fifteen cents.
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Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.
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Words are nets through which all truth escapes.
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