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Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting.
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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Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.
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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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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How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
Erica Jong
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Hate generalizes; love is particular.
Erica Jong
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Beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.
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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Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
Erica Jong
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I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
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My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher." - Socrates (470-399 B.C.) "Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't
Erica Jong
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It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
Erica Jong
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My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.
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
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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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All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
Erica Jong
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Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartednes s that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.
Erica Jong
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The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
Erica Jong
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When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
Erica Jong
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All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
Erica Jong
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What I discovered was is that it's rare to find a person that you feel very intimate with, and you can sleep with lots of people and not find what you're looking for.
Erica Jong
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Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.
Erica Jong
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Eating is never so simple as hunger.
Erica Jong
