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Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

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
System
Adhering
Insisted
Totally

More quotes by Erica Jong

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What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
Erica Jong
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If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
Erica Jong
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No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool.
Erica Jong
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Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.
Erica Jong
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The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.
Erica Jong
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It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
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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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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Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.
Erica Jong
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I think men have always been afraid of women's sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.
Erica Jong
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certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.
Erica Jong
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I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.
Erica Jong
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Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Erica Jong
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I've become more conservative about sex as I've gotten older.
Erica Jong
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I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !
Erica Jong
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Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
Erica Jong
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Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
Erica Jong
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The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.
Erica Jong
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Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.
Erica Jong
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You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn't want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.
Erica Jong