Quote

I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and one of the things I like to say is that one of the biggest impediments I had to becoming a successful writer is I had a very happy childhood.

Anna Quindlen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Childhood
Writer
Becoming
Grew
Successful
Impediments
Happy
Philadelphia
Things
Suburbs
Like
Biggest

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
Writing for UrbanMoms has awarded me a multitude of amazing opportunities. I have traveled to new places alone and with my family. I have discovered new products, new books, new trends and new restaurants, and been able to share them with my readers. I've met other wonderful writers and many incredible celebrities.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
Anna Quindlen
Image
[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
Anna Quindlen
Image
You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.
Anna Quindlen
Image
There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
Anna Quindlen
Image
If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
Anna Quindlen
Image
But never fear, gentlemen castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self that's why it survives
Anna Quindlen
Image
My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.
Anna Quindlen
Image
It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women's rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Familiarity breeds content.
Anna Quindlen
Image
However, there will be a Republican Party platform that will coalesce around their convention. Unless I miss my guess, it will be considerably more conservative on these issues, perhaps even than Governor Romney is, and I think that that will give Americans a clear set of choices about all issues, but about women's issues too.
Anna Quindlen
Image
There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Anna Quindlen
Image
the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.
Anna Quindlen
Image
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
Anna Quindlen
Image
A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.
Anna Quindlen