Erica Jong Quotes
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Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
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I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.
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What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.
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Is a currency worth anything if no one wants it? We used to buy shoes in Italy. Remember?
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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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The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.
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Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.
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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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Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.
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No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
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We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.
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I don't believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.
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That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.
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we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.
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There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.
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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
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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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Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
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The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
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The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.
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A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
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What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.
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People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.