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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.
Erica Jong -
Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
Erica Jong
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Eating is never so simple as hunger.
Erica Jong -
A man assumes that a woman's refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it's no. When a woman says no, it's yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves.
Erica Jong -
Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.
Erica Jong -
Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.
Erica Jong -
... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Erica Jong -
I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.
Erica Jong
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You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.
Erica Jong -
The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.
Erica Jong -
We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.
Erica Jong -
The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
Erica Jong -
The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong
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You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn't want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.
Erica Jong -
I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.
Erica Jong -
It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
Erica Jong -
The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.
Erica Jong -
Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I'm doing something right.
Erica Jong -
Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
Erica Jong
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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
Erica Jong -
Not everybody has to be a parent. In fact, in an overpopulated world where our resources are shrinking, it would be wonderful if people who didn't want children felt free to say so. In the 1970s, there was more tolerance for the idea that not everybody needs to be a biological parent.
Erica Jong -
Anger is really disappointed hope.
Erica Jong -
What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
Erica Jong