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Writers are always at the edge of the inferno, and the fire is licking at our toes. Luckily, this turns us on!
Erica Jong
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Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I'm not talking about hygiene. I'm talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It's their scent.
Erica Jong
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I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !
Erica Jong
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The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
Erica Jong
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We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.
Erica Jong
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Beware of the man who praises women's liberation; he is about to quit his job.
Erica Jong
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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
Erica Jong
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It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
Erica Jong
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There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
Erica Jong
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We all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.
Erica Jong
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Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.
Erica Jong
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I'm interested in what happens to people when they get into that publicity machine. We tend to think things have changed, but there's still a deep sexism underlying the way women are treated publicly.
Erica Jong
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Each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.
Erica Jong
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A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.
Erica Jong
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Feminism is really the right of women to be full human beings and to not be defined only by their childbearing function. Feminism is really the right of women to be human beings. That's it, yet that's so frightening to a lot of people. A full human being wants satisfying work and love. A full human being is entitled to both, and is not simply defined by only one aspect of her being.
Erica Jong
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Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
Erica Jong
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Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.
Erica Jong
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My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
Erica Jong
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I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.
Erica Jong
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A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
Erica Jong
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biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
Erica Jong
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We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.
Erica Jong
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At fifty the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won't be imprisoned anymore.
Erica Jong
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Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
Erica Jong
