Quote

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

Anne Roiphe

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Roiphe
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
House
Self
Distort
Never
Tends
Like
Mirror
Useful
Pity
Mirrors
Fun

More quotes by Anne Roiphe

Image
People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.
Anne Roiphe
Image
What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.
Anne Roiphe
Image
God is a God of Lovingkindness.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I think it is a good thing to have woman friends at every stage of life. We confide in each other, we support each other, we understand each other most of the time. Of course, sometimes we are competitive or angry or distant, too. But I do think it is important not to let the main friendships slip away in the sweep of the days.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.
Anne Roiphe
Image
You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.
Anne Roiphe
Image
One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger.
Anne Roiphe
Image
If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I don't really think it comes as a shock to every writer if somebody in their family is mad at them. Yes, it's very upsetting. But it's inherent in the process of trying to make sense of one's life, which is what I think is perhaps at the bottom of writing at all.
Anne Roiphe
Image
You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.
Anne Roiphe
Image
How deep is our desire to do better than our mothers--to bring daughters into adulthood strong and fierce yet loving and gentle, adventurous and competitive but still nurturing and friendly, sweet yet sharp. We know as working women that we can't quite have it all, but that hasn't stopped us from wanting it all for them.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
Anne Roiphe
Image
When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.
Anne Roiphe
Image
A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.
Anne Roiphe
Image
You need your freedom. You need to be able to do what you want to do as a journalist, as a person who's speaking for other women as you speak for yourself, and you make a choice. You have to be tough enough to take the consequences of that choice.
Anne Roiphe