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It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.

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
Realizing
Talk
Future
Occupies
Much
Forbidden
Normally
Suddenly
Realize
Present

More quotes by 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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Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
Erica Jong
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To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.
Erica Jong
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.
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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The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.
Erica Jong
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This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.
Erica Jong
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As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.
Erica Jong
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One writes not by will but by surrender.
Erica Jong
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It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.
Erica Jong
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we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.
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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Hate generalizes love is particular.
Erica Jong
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Love gives without taking
Erica Jong
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Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
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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As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?
Erica Jong
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we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.
Erica Jong
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Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
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