Judith Rossner Quotes (19 Quotes)

Love is the direct opposite of hate. By definition it's something you can't feel for more than a few minutes at a time, so what's all this bullshit about loving somebody for the rest of your life

The more interesting the 9-to-5 work is, the more it takes away from my real work, which is writing.

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

A lie was something that hadn't happened but might just as well have.

Identity is a bag and a gag. Yet it exists for me with all the force of a fatal disease. Obviously I am here, a mind and a body. To say there's no proof my body exists would be arty and specious and if my mind is more ephemeral, less provable . . .

She kept encouraging me when I was young, and so I just accepted it this was what I was going to do I was going to write books, ... But she never said anything about money or success, so none of that was built into my expectations. Just writing and getting published was enough at first.

So often I heard people paying blind obeisance to change as though it had some virtue of its own. Change or we will die. Change or we will stagnate. Evergreens don't stagnate.

My first book took five years to write and I made $1,000 on it. The second took three years and I made $3,000. All this time I was a housewife being supported by a husband. I was very lucky.

I was 37 years old. I wanted to support myself by writing.

What interests me, ... is why people are so repelled when, after all, everyone started life attached. In a sense, the twins have never been born because they are still tied by an umbilical cord. Relationships between women - daughters, mothers, friends - are one of my strong interests.

It's astonishing what some women will put up with just to have a warm body. Some of the brightest women I know are just obsessed with that search. It's very sad.

I knew I'd have to go to work in real estate or something else or I could never finish my novel.

I'm a lousy journalist.

I was dictating to my mother when I was 5.

I'd like to get out of here without having to talk to the producer.

It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to make yourself wake up one more time. It's harder to stay where you are than to get out. For everyone but you, that is.

I want to write a book about a schoolteacher who's murdered picking up someone when she's cruising a singles bar.

My abiding theme is separations.

Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing.