Erica Jong Quotes
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Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.
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I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
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Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.
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Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
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Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."
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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
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The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.
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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.
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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.
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There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.
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Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
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Keeping a journal implies hope.
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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.
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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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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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The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family.
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We write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.
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People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.
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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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There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
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I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
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I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies.
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I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
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Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.