75 Quotes by Anne Roiphe

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.