Erica Jong Quotes
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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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Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.
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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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As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.
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Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.
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There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.
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I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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I don't think you will ever fully understand how you've touched my life and made me who I am. I don't think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star
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The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
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Perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.
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Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion for passion?
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Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
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We write poems as leaves give oxygen - so we can breathe.
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If you don't have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don't know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
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Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.
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The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
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Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.