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Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
Erica Jong -
If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
Erica Jong
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There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
Erica Jong -
Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.
Erica Jong -
Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.
Erica Jong -
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 -
Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; he is afraid.
Erica Jong -
Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.
Erica Jong
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
Erica Jong -
I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
Erica Jong -
It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You've given me a splitting headache! You've given me indigestion! You've given me crotch rot! You've given me auditory hallucinations! You've given me a heart attack! You've given me cancer!
Erica Jong -
I have enormous pride in the survival of the Jewish people, the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, but I'm not observant, and I don't belong to a synagogue. I don't go to temple on high holy days, but I'm proud to be Jewish.
Erica Jong -
If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
Erica Jong -
Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
Erica Jong
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Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.
Erica Jong -
I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.
Erica Jong -
Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
Erica Jong -
Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
Erica Jong -
As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?
Erica Jong -
certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.
Erica Jong
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You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare
Erica Jong -
Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
Erica Jong -
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.
Erica Jong -
The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
Erica Jong