Erica Jong Quotes
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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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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 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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It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
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I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
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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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I don't believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.
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Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
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Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
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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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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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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.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
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Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.
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Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
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Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
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You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
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What makes a Man love Death, Fanny? Is it because he hopes to avert his own by watchin' the Deaths of others? Doth he hope to devour Death by devourin' Executions with his Eyes? I'll ne'er understand it, if I live to be eight hundred Years. The Human Beast is more Beast than Human, 'tis true.
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Pleasure is terrifying because it breaks down the boundaries between people. Embracing passion means living with fear.
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Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
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The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men 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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The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
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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.