Erica Jong Quotes
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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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I think feminism means what it has always meant - women want to use all their gifts, all their talents and be judged impartially for them. I don't think feminism has ever meant anything else.
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I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
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Anger is really disappointed hope.
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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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But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said. On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop. But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?' Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.
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Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
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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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It's useful to know how much society's holding you back. My mother would talk about how she was told by the head of her art school that she was the best painter, but that she wouldn't get the biggest prize because she would waste her talent by having children. I think we have to get honest with girls about how they can expect the world to block them, and we have to prepare girls, and ourselves, to break through those blocks.
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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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Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
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Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.
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Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
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My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.
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Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.
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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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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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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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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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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
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I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
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Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.
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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.