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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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Erica Jong
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 26
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Erica Mann Jong
Make
Tell
Things
Doesn
Exaggerate
Truth
Rewrite
Look
Edit
Looks
Edits
Mean
Dramatic
Writing
Rule
Trying
Emotional

More quotes by 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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How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
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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Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong
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Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
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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At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
Erica Jong
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It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
Erica Jong
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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
Erica Jong
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One writes not by will but by surrender.
Erica Jong
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They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.
Erica Jong
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The soul is awakened through service.
Erica Jong
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certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.
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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The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
Erica Jong
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If you've been a pretty woman and always pursued by lovers, losing that and not having that - it feels like a great loss.
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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in freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.
Erica Jong
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Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
Erica Jong
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Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
Erica Jong