Judith Rossner Quotations

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?

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.

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

I was dictating to my mother when I was 5.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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, the solution of being a writer with solid (touchable, tearable, burnable) books is as close as anyone has come to a perfect answer.