Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
ERICA JONGNo one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
More Erica Jong Quotes
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My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.
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Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.
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The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.
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I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
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Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth)
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I hope we don’t have to keep going back over the same territory and winning the same rights over and over again. The battle for birth control. The battle for abortion.
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I don’t think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.
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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
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Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved…Freedom is…not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.
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Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”
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Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.
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How could one create life with someone who represented death?
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Of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.
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My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
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We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.
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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.
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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.
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Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss.
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If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
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Loving someone is a loss of freedom – but one doesn’t think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
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People are interested in their own sexuality and they’ve always reflected it in their art. End of story.
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Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
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Art is always an energy exchange.
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Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
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The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
ERICA JONG