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perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.
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
Often
Essentially
Art
Driven
Happens
Perfection
Also
Divine
Capriciously
Play
Becomes
Dogged
Work
Enemy
Playful
Since
Perfectionism
Less
Professionally
More quotes by Erica Jong
Conflict is the soul of literature.
Erica Jong
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
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
Erica Jong
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
Erica Jong
Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.
Erica Jong
What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.
Erica Jong
I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
Erica Jong
That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.
Erica Jong
what was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?
Erica Jong
We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.
Erica Jong
Love is everything it's cracked up to be
Erica Jong
Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.
Erica Jong
We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.
Erica Jong
I remember everything but forgive anyway.
Erica Jong
I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
Erica Jong
Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.
Erica Jong
At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
Erica Jong
Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.
Erica Jong
Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?
Erica Jong
One writes not by will but by surrender.
Erica Jong