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If you've been a pretty woman and always pursued by lovers, losing that and not having that - it feels like a great loss.
Erica Jong -
I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Erica Jong
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In a way women are fleshier because of estrogen. It's hard for us to lose weight because when we get super skinny we don't ovulate. Women in camps during the Holocaust didn't menstruate and didn't ovulate. They were starving; they were terrified. Why emulate that condition? It's nonsensical to me.
Erica Jong -
When you start having lunch and actually eating, it's already over.
Erica Jong -
Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.
Erica Jong -
In any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated lover? Oneself, oneself, and no one but oneself!
Erica Jong -
Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.
Erica Jong -
It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
Erica Jong
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Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.
Erica Jong -
I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.
Erica Jong -
It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.
Erica Jong -
I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.
Erica Jong -
We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.
Erica Jong -
Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.
Erica Jong
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Art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.
Erica Jong -
She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.
Erica Jong -
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
Erica Jong -
A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
Erica Jong -
Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.
Erica Jong -
What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.
Erica Jong
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Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.
Erica Jong -
I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.
Erica Jong -
One writes not by will but by surrender.
Erica Jong -
It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.
Erica Jong