Erica Jong Quotes
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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 baby's mother also needs a mother.
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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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... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
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My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.
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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.
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The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do.
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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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A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
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Conflict is the soul of literature.
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Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.
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There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.
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Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
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It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
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We find our calling or it finds us, and it's a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.
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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.
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Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms.
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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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Is there no Villain in this World who doth not regard himself as a poor abus'd Innocent, no She-Wolf who doth not think herself a Lamb, no Shark who doth not fancy that she is a Goldfish?
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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
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Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
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All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
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I knew I was in England by the smell.
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I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.