Anne Roiphe Quotes

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

Science fiction offers an intensely bracing angle of view for writers to adopt, especially in a time of constant innovation and crisis, and it is a scandal that in 1999 so many writers have written it and continue to write it in obscurity.

I'm not 100 percent anybody's ideological prism.

I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.

I'm clearly not a writer, but I'm always a fan of them.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

I don't fit neatly into anybody's political boxes, and I think that sometimes disturbs people. But I don't think most Alaskans fit neatly into the Republican box or the Democratic box. They don't think of themselves that way.

I like people like Andre Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Willa Cather, Robert Graves, Erik Erikson, and Francis Steegmuller.

All my big heroes are literary, writers.

I like Ben Stein. I think he's funny, creative, and an insightful commentator on a host of issues.

As a writer, you look for inspiration wherever you can get it.

There were authors I read as an adult who completely inspired me. But when I was a teenager, I got to hang out with Tom Stoppard for a bit. My mum was his wife's secretary. He was obviously super smart, but he was also approachable and normal. I think he was the first person I'd ever met who I'd thought, 'Oh, I see. There's a living in this.'

There are so many stories to be told, by so many good writers.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

Possibly because I earn my living as a writer of fiction and possibly because it's just the sensible thing to do, I like to pay attention to everything I come across, including things that evoke the uncanny or the mysterious.

I like very much to read novels. I like very much some writers.

I like to write. Prolific is part of who I am.

It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.

Every single path is so different, but I would definitely say that the idea of what a writer is or should be is not a thing anymore. Everyone is redefining publishing, writing, and storytelling in general.

I write songs based on things I see in the culture around me.

Being in the Sahitya Akademi, I did know quite a few poets - Jayanta Mahapatra, Sitakant Mahapatra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, to name a few. There were many poets.

A writer is what I am.