Anne Roiphe Quotes

I was haunted by a bear attack that happened in Algonquin Park in 1991. The problem was that I don't believe in ghosts, so that ruled out an exorcism. My other choice was to start writing.

Comedians don't have a monopoly on suffering. But creative people are sometimes fortunate enough to be able to incorporate their most traumatic experiences into their art.

Writing for me is definitely a form of ventilation - a way for me to cope and deal with emotions. I think it is for any writer.

I unfortunately had a lot of medical procedures throughout my life, so I decided to paint all of my surgeries as a way to heal and as a way to grow.

People always ask me, 'I don't know how you could watch that, how that affects you,' and I just tell them, 'I went through it in real life, so it's like pilots watching a 'Top Gun' movie or cyclists watching a bicycle movie,' something like that.

I've been in situations before where something was going on, and that's the only way you can kinda cope with it is to write about it.

By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.

Her writing was her only escape, her only means of survival. It was a respite from a cruel world, despite seemingly comfortable surroundings.

War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.

I write songs about things that I'm simultaneously trying not to think about.

When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it.

My grandfather for example only died twice, once during the war and once in the 1980s.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

At its heartmeat core, writing is about exploring the questions of your heart on the assumption that what intrigues you, what inflames or amuses or ennobles you, will have the same effect on someone else. It's about taking chances, and taking risks, and pushing yourself to be honest in the issues that present themselves.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

I do find it therapeutic, writing about stuff that was frightening and painful as a child, and managing to see it from an adult's point of view. To get it out of the closet onto paper, metaphorically speaking, is therapeutic.

I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.

Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort.

I do my best to write my way through it. It helps the laughing, reflective part come quicker.

Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

I don't think my work is so much about opening up wounds. I think it's about understanding the nature of the wound. I'm not bleeding on the canvas. I, like most people, have suffered traumatic events. The character of a person's life is determined by the way they deal with those events. I am a creative person and I deal with it creatively.