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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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Erica Jong
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 26
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Erica Mann Jong
Profession
Lonely
Alone
Order
Must
Damnably
Feels
Cosmically
Writing
Banished
World
Banish

More quotes by Erica Jong

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I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !
Erica Jong
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All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
Erica Jong
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I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.
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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It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.
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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I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.
Erica Jong
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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
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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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We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.
Erica Jong
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I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
Erica Jong
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I remember everything but forgive anyway.
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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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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How could one create life with someone who represented death?
Erica Jong
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You can't be creative and still be a good girl.
Erica Jong
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Conflict is the soul of literature.
Erica Jong
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You are always naked when you start writing you are always as if you had never written anything before you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare
Erica Jong
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biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
Erica Jong