Quote

I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.

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
Never
Calm
Begin
Written
Morning
Process
Next
Feel
Familiar
Feels
Anxiety

More quotes by 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
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How could one create life with someone who represented death?
Erica Jong
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Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.
Erica Jong
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Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?
Erica Jong
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In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
Erica Jong
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Not everybody has to be a parent. In fact, in an overpopulated world where our resources are shrinking, it would be wonderful if people who didn't want children felt free to say so. In the 1970s, there was more tolerance for the idea that not everybody needs to be a biological parent.
Erica Jong
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Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.
Erica Jong
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Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
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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Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
Erica Jong
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We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.
Erica Jong
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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
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I have enormous pride in the survival of the Jewish people, the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, but I'm not observant, and I don't belong to a synagogue. I don't go to temple on high holy days, but I'm proud to be Jewish.
Erica Jong
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A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
Erica Jong
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Eating is never so simple as hunger.
Erica Jong
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Conflict is the soul of literature.
Erica Jong
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When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
Erica Jong
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... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Erica Jong
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The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.
Erica Jong
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Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.
Erica Jong