Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Roiphe
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Give
Rules
Live
Certainly
Enough
Create
Bucking
Giving
Fighting
Conformist
Kind
Space
Unspoken
Think
Society
Spoken
Thinking
Artist
Kinds
Didn
Artists

More quotes by Anne Roiphe

Image
We have to recognize that it is a very, very painful thing for people to be exposed to their social community, to be exposed in the world, as not what they would have wanted to be seen as. This is very painful and difficult for people.
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
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
I would prefer you not to say, That was the most terribly written piece I've ever read. That would hurt me. But you don't think I'm the best person in the world? Well, alright.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.
Anne Roiphe
Image
Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.
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
Image
I am not a perfect friend, and it is impossible not to rebuff or be rebuffed if you move about the world.
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
We were not always 70, or rather our 70 is an accumulation of all the other ways we were. Our 5-year-old selves became our 10-year-old selves, and so on and on and if we unpack our selves, the full album appears. Every moment is a part of the following moment, and we are all a continuum.
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 know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.
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
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
A person who has no secrets is a liar. We always fold ourselves away from others just enough to preserve a secret or two, something that we cannot share without destroying our inner landscape.
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
Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.
Anne Roiphe
Image
I have two writer daughters, and a psychoanalyst daughter, and a lawyer daughter, and they wish we didn't write, I'm sure, but we write. If we were a painting family, we would paint.
Anne Roiphe