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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

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Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.
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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.
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Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.
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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.
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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
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People always think their world is coming to an end if they're exposed, and of course it isn't coming to an end it goes right on exactly the way it always was.
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.
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You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.
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Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.
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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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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
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Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.
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 think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.
Anne Roiphe
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God is a God of Lovingkindness.
Anne Roiphe
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I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.
Anne Roiphe
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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
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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