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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

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Anne Roiphe
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Everyone
Dominant
Else
Straight
America
Meant
Look
Needed
Looks
Hair
Like
Grew
Needing
Class
Symbolic
Looking
Ruling

More quotes by Anne Roiphe

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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.
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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
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It is hard to hold on to friendships when people move away to another state or to another world.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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
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I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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
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People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above.
Anne Roiphe
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You really can't say things that upset someone in print and expect them to be nice and leave you their money. That's just not reasonable.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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God is a God of Lovingkindness.
Anne Roiphe
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Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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