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It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.

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
Pain
Write
Writing
Wordless
Easier
Joy

More quotes by Erica Jong

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Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.
Erica Jong
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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
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A wet dream in the mind of New York.
Erica Jong
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Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.
Erica Jong
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I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Erica Jong
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It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
Erica Jong
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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
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At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
Erica Jong
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I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.
Erica Jong
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Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
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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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
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Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.
Erica Jong
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Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.
Erica Jong
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How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
Erica Jong
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I am thinking of the onion again. . . . Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.
Erica Jong
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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
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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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
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