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Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.

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
Stops
Torture
Writers
Moments
Self
Doubters
Brief

More quotes by Erica Jong

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Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
Erica Jong
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Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
Erica Jong
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What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.
Erica Jong
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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
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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
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I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.
Erica Jong
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Writers are always at the edge of the inferno, and the fire is licking at our toes. Luckily, this turns us on!
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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Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
Erica Jong
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The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
Erica Jong
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The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
Erica Jong
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A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
Erica Jong
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Denounce useless guilt. Don’t make a cult of suffering. Live in the now(or at least the soon). Always do the things you fear most. Courage is an acquired taste like caviar. Trust all joy. If the evil eye fixes you in its gaze, look elsewhere. Get ready to be 87.
Erica Jong
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A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.
Erica Jong
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As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.
Erica Jong
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A wet dream in the mind of New York.
Erica Jong
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I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.
Erica Jong
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The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
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Because I loved myself, I was loved.
Erica Jong
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Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.
Erica Jong