Judith Rossner Quotations

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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