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You can't be creative and still be a good girl.

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
Creative
Girl
Stills
Still
Good

More quotes by Erica Jong

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In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving -instead of actually getting up and leaving.
Erica Jong
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Being a daughter is only half the equation bearing one is the other.
Erica Jong
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Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.
Erica Jong
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Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.
Erica Jong
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Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong
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The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.
Erica Jong
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You're not too fat you're just in the wrong country.
Erica Jong
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Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
Erica Jong
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Most sex is not really intimate.
Erica Jong
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As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.
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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A baby's mother also needs a mother.
Erica Jong
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There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.
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 want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
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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At certain historic moments, grandparents took on childrearing responsibilities. In many cultures, they still do. Chinese grandparents who are able to retire at 55 are seen all over Beijing bouncing grandbabies. In the United States, we can't afford to retire at 55.
Erica Jong
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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
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Anger is really disappointed hope.
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