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
Mirrors
Fun
House
Self
Distort
Never
Tends
Like
Mirror
Useful
Pity

More quotes by Anne Roiphe

Image
I believe that it is our human right to be parents and women. And there's no contradiction between feminism, which means women should have all that they are entitled to, all that they can do, all the opportunities that they can take advantage of they should have.
Anne Roiphe
Image
You have to have a certain kind of thickening of the hide. I mean, I'm not particularly worried about what other people think. If other people think that I was not the world's most perfect mother, they are completely right.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Is it possible that my sons-in-law will do toilets? If we raise boys to know that diapers need to be changed and refrigerators need to be cleaned, there's hope for the next generation.
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
My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.
Anne Roiphe
Image
They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.
Anne Roiphe
Image
We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Many writers do write about their families and their immediate loved ones and love experiences, either as children or as adults. And very often people get offended by it.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Most of us don't have mothers who blazed a trail for us--at least, not all the way. Coming of age before or during the inception of the women's movement, whether as working parents or homemakers, whether married or divorced, our mothers faced conundrums--what should they be? how should they act?--that became our uncertainties.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.
Anne Roiphe
Image
It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.
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
Sometimes what we call love is just a settling of old scores, or a seeking of forbidden pain, or a circuitous path to the kingdom of cruelty, or she may simply have confused lack of capital with heroism while searching for rescue without knowing from what.
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
Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does.
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 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
A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.
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