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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
Looks
Edits
Mean
Dramatic
Writing
Rule
Trying
Emotional
Make
Tell
Things
Doesn
Exaggerate
Truth
Rewrite
Look
Edit

More quotes by Erica Jong

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I think men have always been afraid of women's sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.
Erica Jong
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What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
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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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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Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.
Erica Jong
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Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?
Erica Jong
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we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.
Erica Jong
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I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.
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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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
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I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.
Erica Jong
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We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.
Erica Jong
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Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
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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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
Erica Jong
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Every time I catch myself saying, Oh no, you shouldn't try that, I think, Yes, I should.
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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One writes not by will but by surrender.
Erica Jong
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In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.
Erica Jong
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We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.
Erica Jong