Erica Jong Quotes
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
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When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
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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
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Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.
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Why does life need evidence of life?
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My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.
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Poetry is fired by love.
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Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
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Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
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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.
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You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.
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Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
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Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.
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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.
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I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
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Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
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I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
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Most sex is not really intimate.
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That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.
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Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.
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Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
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We write poems as leaves give oxygen - so we can breathe.