Paula Fox Quotes & Sayings

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. — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

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

I imagine there's a timid animal inside me ... When it's afraid, I feel it tremble. It can't hear. It only knows the fear it feels. It doesn't have memory or an idea of the future. It lives in the present - the right now - and I try to remember it is only a part of myself, a small frightened thing I can pity. When I'm able to do that, something happens. The animal grows less afraid. — Paula Fox

What is there to imagine with a gun?" asked Papa . . . .
"Something dead," Papa said more quietly. "That's what there is to imagine with a gun. — Paula Fox

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

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. — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

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

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. — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

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

Words are nets through which all truth escapes
("News From The World") — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

How pleasant to read uncompromised by purpose. — Paula Fox

She'd been noticing the feet of colored people ever since she'd come south. "They've been pressed down to the earth so hard," she said. "And the weight of what they carry tortures their feet. — Paula Fox

Suddenly drained of the nervous excitement which had made her forget momentarily her tiredness and the monochromatic dullness of this early morning, she buried her face in the edge of the bed. Otto, somewhat apathetically, began to stroke her bag beneath her nightgown. She was grateful that they had not fought - she didn't have the energy - but a sullen disappointment roiled about just behind her gratitude. Was Otto going to make love to her while the Negro in the street slept in his own vomit? — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl. — Paula Fox

I've done a Russian movie," Claire said. "Thank God they're still stuck in realism, Zola-crazy. Subtitling their films is like captioning a child's picture book. — Paula Fox

He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water. — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

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

There was nothing to imagine with a gun except something that was dead. — Paula Fox

Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble. — Paula Fox

When he sat on the Makepeace veranda, it was as if he'd gone to another country — Paula Fox

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

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. — Paula Fox

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

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. — Paula Fox

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

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. — Paula Fox

Freedom is a public library. — Paula Fox

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

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

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

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. — Paula Fox

A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it. — Paula Fox

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

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. — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox

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

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. — Paula Fox

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. — Paula Fox