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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.

Erica Jong

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Erica Jong
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 26
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Erica Mann Jong
Even
Miracle
Never
Became
Poet
Writer
Getting
Money
Firsts
Published
First
Poets

More quotes by Erica Jong

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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.
Erica Jong
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If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
Erica Jong
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Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.
Erica Jong
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They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.
Erica Jong
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As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.
Erica Jong
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It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
Erica Jong
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I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.
Erica Jong
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The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
Erica Jong
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In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
Erica Jong
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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.
Erica Jong
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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.
Erica Jong
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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
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Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
Erica Jong
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Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.
Erica Jong
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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.
Erica Jong
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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.
Erica Jong
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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
Erica Jong
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Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong
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A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
Erica Jong
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I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.
Erica Jong