Erica Jong Quotes
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What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
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It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.
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But come back in November or December, in February or March, when the fog, la nebbia, settles upon the city like a marvelous monster, and you will have little trouble believing that things can appear and disappear in this labyrinthine city, or that time here could easily slip in its sprockets and take you, willingly or unwillingly, back.
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Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.
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Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then.
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I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.
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The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.
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I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
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It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
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Anger is really disappointed hope.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
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The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.
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Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
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Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.
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I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
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As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?
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Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
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Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.
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Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.
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I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
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I was surprised by my daughter's generation and how they were rebelling against the '70s idea that sex was perfect and it should be sought.
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I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.
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Henry Miller was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation - and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.
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In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving -instead of actually getting up and leaving.