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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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Erica Jong
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 26
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Erica Mann Jong
Worshipped
Dying
Dies
Young
Think
Thinking
Keats
Braver

More quotes by 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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Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
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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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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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
Erica Jong
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Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
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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Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
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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I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies.
Erica Jong
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Love is love, but marriage is an investment.
Erica Jong
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perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.
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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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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I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.
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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If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
Erica Jong
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Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.
Erica Jong
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Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers...but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.
Erica Jong
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I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
Erica Jong