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We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

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
Look
Looks
Procrastinate
Every
Procrastinating
Procrastination
Judged
Excuse
Scared
Fear

More quotes by Erica Jong

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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!
Erica Jong
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What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.
Erica Jong
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Most sex is not really intimate.
Erica Jong
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Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
Erica Jong
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The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
Erica Jong
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Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.
Erica Jong
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What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.
Erica Jong
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Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
Erica Jong
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We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.
Erica Jong
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Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartednes s that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.
Erica Jong
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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
Erica Jong
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How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
Erica Jong
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The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.
Erica Jong
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If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
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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Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
Erica Jong
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I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.
Erica Jong
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It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
Erica Jong
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Anger is really disappointed hope.
Erica Jong
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All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
Erica Jong