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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
Work
Enemy
Playful
Since
Perfectionism
Less
Professionally
Often
Essentially
Art
Driven
Happens
Perfection
Also
Divine
Capriciously
Play
Becomes
Dogged
More quotes by Erica Jong
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
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
The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
Erica Jong
The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.
Erica Jong
Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.
Erica Jong
Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
Erica Jong
Solitude is considered un-American.
Erica Jong
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
You can't be creative and still be a good girl.
Erica Jong
The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
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
Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
Erica Jong
Love is love, but marriage is an investment.
Erica Jong
Anger is really disappointed hope.
Erica Jong
I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
Erica Jong
Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
Erica Jong
biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
Erica Jong
It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.
Erica Jong
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