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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
Compose
Edits
Utter
Discipline
Freedom
Edit

More quotes by Erica Jong

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I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
Erica Jong
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Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.
Erica Jong
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Because I loved myself, I was loved.
Erica Jong
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I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?
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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Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.
Erica Jong
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We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.
Erica Jong
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A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.
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 future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
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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Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.
Erica Jong
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It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
Erica Jong
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The soul is awakened through service.
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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I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.
Erica Jong
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Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
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
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When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
Erica Jong
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You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
Erica Jong