Paula Fox Quotes

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.

If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog - you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.

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.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.

I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

Teachers inspire the smallest hearts to grow big enough to change the world.

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.

The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.

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.

My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth.

I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.

we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.

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.

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.

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.

To be human is to be in a story.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

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.

My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.

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.

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.

Freedom is a public library.

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.

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.

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.

Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.

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.

I don't like to listen to music while I'm working.

I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

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.

And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall.

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.

People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.