A Quote by Grace Paley
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.
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Folklore has a moral center to it. Folklore is always, always, always on the side of the underdog, and children have a natural instinct towards justice. They feel indignation at needless cruelty and wistfulness about acts of mercy and kindness.
Lenity has almost always wisdom and justice on its side.
Why don't they make more science fiction movies? The answer to any question starting, Why don't they- is almost always, Money.
I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
I've always just liked writing poetry, but it's much later that I've discovered that there's this whole poetry world out there, that you almost have to be accepted into, like this little club.
Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.
In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
I originally went to school for writing, for non-fiction. I'm specifically a poetry major within literature, but I don't know.
Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'
One of the primary differences for me between fiction and poetry is that fiction uses every sort of tool that poetry does but hides it much, much more. Fiction doesn't necessarily reveal what it's doing with rhythm and sound and patterning.
Poetry can save the world. I'm a real believer in its power of healing and transforming. I wish more people read it ... Poetry is probably as close as I would get to religious feeling. I think poetry makes the world stand still.
I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.
A lot of times you go to a fight and the crowd will be for a certain fighter who is the favourite but if the underdog shows he has a chance they sometimes even swing to side of the underdog.
Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
When I write, I have always tried to be on the side of the weak. The side of the powerful is not literature's side.
What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.
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