Erica Jong Quotes
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We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.
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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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If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.
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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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I knew I was in England by the smell.
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Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
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Language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.
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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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I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.
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I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
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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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The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.
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There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship-only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.
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In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
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... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
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I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.
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When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.
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In freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.
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I look forward and see myself look back.
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Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?
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Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I'm doing something right.
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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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I didn't believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one's self. In laughing even at one's need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn't feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts.
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My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.