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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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Anne Roiphe
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 25
Essayist
Film Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Family
Psychoanalyst
Wish
Daughters
Write
Lawyer
Didn
Paint
Two
Daughter
Writing
Painting
Would
Writer
Sure

More quotes by Anne Roiphe

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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
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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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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
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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 know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.
Anne Roiphe
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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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Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.
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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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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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
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I am not a perfect friend, and it is impossible not to rebuff or be rebuffed if you move about the world.
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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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
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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
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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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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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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
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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
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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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I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.
Anne Roiphe