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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.
Erica Jong -
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
Erica Jong
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But come back in November or December, in February or March, when the fog, la nebbia, settles upon the city like a marvelous monster, and you will have little trouble believing that things can appear and disappear in this labyrinthine city, or that time here could easily slip in its sprockets and take you, willingly or unwillingly, back.
Erica Jong -
Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting.
Erica Jong -
What I discovered was is that it's rare to find a person that you feel very intimate with, and you can sleep with lots of people and not find what you're looking for.
Erica Jong -
The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
Erica Jong -
What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.
Erica Jong -
Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.
Erica Jong
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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.
Erica Jong -
Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.
Erica Jong -
Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
Erica Jong -
I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.
Erica Jong -
I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn't have to choose. And I believe that's always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.
Erica Jong -
Keeping a journal implies hope.
Erica Jong
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And what if I don't want forgiveness?
Erica Jong -
The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family.
Erica Jong -
Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
Erica Jong -
Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
Erica Jong -
It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.
Erica Jong -
I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.
Erica Jong
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The body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
Erica Jong -
Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
Erica Jong -
Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.
Erica Jong -
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
Erica Jong