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Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

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
Utter
Discipline
Freedom
Edit
Compose
Edits

More quotes by Erica Jong

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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.
Erica Jong
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Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then.
Erica Jong
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I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
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
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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
Erica Jong
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Hate generalizes love is particular.
Erica Jong
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The soul is awakened through service.
Erica Jong
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Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.
Erica Jong
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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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We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.
Erica Jong
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The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.
Erica Jong
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Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
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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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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Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
Erica Jong
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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
Erica Jong
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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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The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.
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
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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