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It's Useful To Know How Much Society's Holding You Back. My Mother Would Talk About How She Was Told By The Head Of Her Art School That She Was The Best Painter, But That She Wouldn't Get The Biggest Prize Because She Would Waste Her Talent By Having Children. I Think We Have To Get Honest With Girls About How They Can Expect The World To Block Them, And We Have To Prepare Girls, And Ourselves, To Break Through Those Blocks.

-Erica Jong

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It's Useful To Know

Erica Jong

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It's Useful To Know How Much Society's Holding You Back. My Mother Would Talk About How She Was Told By The Head Of Her Art School That She Was The Best Painter, But That She Wouldn't Get The Biggest Prize Because She Would Waste Her Talent By Having Children. I Think We Have To Get Honest With Girls About How They Can Expect The World To Block Them, And We Have To Prepare Girls, And Ourselves, To Break Through Those Blocks.

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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.

No One Ever Found Wisdom Without Also Being A Fool.

How Could One Create Life With Someone Who Represented Death?

Compose With Utter Freedom And Edit With Utter Discipline.

Fear Is A Sign-usually A Sign That I'm Doing Something Right.

Murky Language Means Someone Wants To Pick Your Pocket.

The Dilemma Is That If One Does Not Risk Anything One Risks Even More.

Beware Of Books. They Are More Than Innocent Assemblages Of Paper And Ink And String And Glue. If They Are Any Good, They Have The Spirit Of The Author Within. Authors Are Rogues And Ruffians And Easy Lays. They Are Gluttons For Sweets And Savories. They Devour Life And Always Want More. They Have Sap, Spirit, Sex. Books Are Panderers. The Jews Are Not Wrong To Worship Books. A Real Book Has Pheromones And Sprouts Grass Through Its Cover.

I Went For Years Not Finishing Anything. Because, Of Course, When You Finish Something You Can Be Judged...i Had Poems Which Were Re-written So Many Times I Suspect It Was Just A Way Of Avoiding Sending Them Out.

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.

It Took Me Years To Learn To Sit At My Desk For More Than Two Minutes At A Time, To Put Up With The Solitude And The Terror Of Failure, And The Godawful Silence And The White Paper.

I Look Forward And See Myself Look Back.

Feminism Is Really The Right Of Women To Be Full Human Beings And To Not Be Defined Only By Their Childbearing Function. Feminism Is Really The Right Of Women To Be Human Beings. That's It, Yet That's So Frightening To A Lot Of People. A Full Human Being Wants Satisfying Work And Love. A Full Human Being Is Entitled To Both, And Is Not Simply Defined By Only One Aspect Of Her Being.

You Must Find The Right Voice (or Voices) For The Timbre That Can Convince A Reader To Give Himself Up To You.

The Absolute Bedrock Of Our Independence Is Having Control Over Our Own Bodies. You Cannot Be Independent If The Government Or Someone Else Says Whether Or Not You Can Use Birth Control. Unless You're In Charge Of Your Body, You're Not In Charge Of Anything. I Think That's Really The Bottom Line Of Feminism.

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.

Each One An Antidote To The One That Went Before. Each One A Reaction, An About-face, A Rebound.

Women In America Read 'lifestyle' Pages Which Are Really Glorifications Of Shopping. They Teach Us We Must Veil Ourselves In Make-up To Be Loved. And We Willingly Take The Veil, Thinking Ourselves Freed By It. Make-up Is No More Optional For Us Than The Veil Is For Arab Women: It Is Our Western Version Of The Chador.

Generations Of Women Have Sacrificed Their Lives To Become Their Mothers. But We Do Not Have That Luxury Any More. The World Has Changed Too Much To Let Us Have The Lives Our Mothers Had. And We Can No Longer Afford The Guilt We Feel At Not Being Our Mothers. We Cannot Afford Any Guilt That Pulls Us Back To The Past. We Have To Grow Up, Whether We Want To Or Not. We Have To Stop Blaming Men And Mothers And Seize Every Second Of Our Lives With Passion. We Can No Longer Afford To Waste Our Creativity. We Cannot Afford Spiritual Laziness.

The Words Carry Their Own Momentum. A Confession In Motion Tends To Stay In Motion. Newton's First Law Of Jealousy.

I Don't Believe In Organized Religion. I Believe That People Should Try To Connect With Their Own Life Force And Let It Lead Them To Do With Their Lives What They Will Find Satisfying.

Life Has No Plot. It Is By Far More Interesting Than Anything You Can Say About It.

Driving Me Away Is Easier Than Saying Goodbye.

There Is No Loneliness Like The Loneliness Of A Dead Marriage.

You Reach A Point In Life Where You Realize That You Might As Well Do What You Need To Do, Because Your Being Loved Or Not Being Loved Is Really A Function Of The People You Encounter And Not Of Yourself. That Is An Immensely Liberating Insight.

O What Is It About Having One's Own Babe Upon One's Hip That Makes A Woman Wish To Go Home To Her Mother? A Desire To Say: 'look, The Circle Is Compleat'? A Desire To Say: 'look, I Have Cross'd The Divide And Now Am More Like You'? A Desire To Say: 'look, This Babe I Offer You Is My Most Precious Gift'?

Why Do Analysts Always Answer A Question With A Question?

Plot Is Just A Fancy Way Of Saying 'and Then.

This Is The Sad Bed Of Chosen Chastity Because You Are Miles And Mountains Away.

Long Distance Relationship

Loving Someone Is A Loss Of Freedom - But One Doesn't Think Of It As Loss Because One Gains So Much Else.

The Most Important Thing For A Writer Is To Be Locked In A Study.

Books Go Out Into The World, Travel Mysteriously From Hand To Hand, And Somehow Find Their Way To The People Who Need Them At The Times When They Need Them ... Cosmic Forces Guide Such Passings-along.

I Prefer To Work In The Morning. I Get Up Now At Five In The Morning. In The Morning Is When I Feel Freshest.

If You Apologize For Something That Isn't Your Fault In The First Place, You, In Effect, Confirm Their Belief That It Is Your Fault.

Humor Is One Of The Most Serious Tools We Have For Dealing With Impossible Situations.

Impossible Situations

Biography Is Essentially A Collaborative Art, The Latest Biographer Collaborating With All Those Who Wrote Earlier.

The Most Important Education You Get Is Your Own - The One You Learn In Solitude.

If You Don't Have Time To Do It Right You Must Have Time To Do It Right You Must Have Time To Do It Over. If You Don't Know Where You Are Going, How Do You Know When You Get There? If You Don't Risk Anything, You Risk Even More.

The Hardest Part Is Believing In Yourself At The Notebook Stage. It Is Like Believing In Dreams In The Morning.

Writers Do Not Choose Their Subjects; Their Subjects Choose Them.

Once I Worshipped Keats For Dying Young. Now I Think It's Braver To Die Old.

Genius Is A Strong Aphrodisiac.

The Lives Of Great Men Are More Oft' At Variance With Their Profess'd Phillosophies Than Consistent With 'em.

Women Really Must Have Equal Pay For Equal Work, Equality In Work At Home, And Reproductive Choices. Men Must Press For These Things Also. They Must Cease To See Them As "women's Issues" And Learn That They Are Everyone's Issues - Essential To Survival On Planet Earth.

Allow Me To Put The Record Straight. I Am Forty-six And Have Been For Some Years Past.

You Are Always Naked When You Start Writing; You Are Always As If You Had Never Written Anything Before; You Are Always A Beginner. Shakespeare Wrote Without Knowing He Would Become Shakespeare

All Natural Disasters Are Comforting Because They Reaffirm Our Impotence, In Which, Otherwise, We Might Stop Believing. At Times It Is Strangely Sedative To Know The Extent Of Your Own Powerlessness.

And The Trouble Is, If You Don't Risk Anything, You Risk Even More.

The Older We Get, The More Jewish We Become In My Family.

A Baby's Mother Also Needs A Mother.

We Write Poems / As Leaves Give Oxygen - / So We Can Breathe.

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.

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Beware The Lure Of A Handsome Face, The All Too Ready Assumption That The Lovely Façade Must Needs Have Lovely Chambers Within; For As 'tis With Great Houses, So, Too, With Great Men.

Of All The Foolish Fears Of Humankind, Fear Of The Future Is By Far The Most Foolish.

As Women Got Little Crumbs Of Power, Men Began To Act Paranoid - As If We'd Disabled Them Utterly. Do All Women Have To Keep Silent For Men To Speak? Do All Women Have To Be Legless For Men To Walk?

The Passion That One Soul Hath For God Cannot Be Judged By Another.

Poems, Like Dreams, Are A Sort Of Royal Road To The Unconscious. They Tell You What Your Secret Self Cannot Express.

Nothing You Write Is Ever Lost To You. At Some Other Level Your Mind Is Working On It.

Women Are The Only Exploited Group In History To Have Been Idealized Into Powerlessness.

Memory Is The Most Transient Of All Possessions. And When It Goes, It Leaves As Few Traces As Stars That Have Disappeared.

One Writes Not By Will But By Surrender.

Each Of Us Only Feels The Torn Lining Of His Own Coat And Sees The Wholeness Of The Other Person's.

The Aim Of My Writing Is To Utterly Remove The Distance Between Author And Reader So That The Book Becomes A Sort Of Semipermeable Membrane Through Which Feelings, Ideas, Nutrients Pass.

It Is Not Unusual To Hate Great Writers Before We Learn To Love Them. Because They Have Created Something That Did Not Yet Exist, They Must Also Create Their Audience. Sometimes The Audience Is Not Yet Ready. Sometimes It Has Yet To Be Born.

It's Hard To Do Fiction And Nonfiction Simultaneously.

Fiction And Nonfiction

Take Your Life In Your Own Hands, And What Happens? A Terrible Thing: No One To Blame.

You Don't Get To Choose What You Get Famous For And You Don't Get To Control Which Of Your Life's Many Struggles Gets To Stand For You.

Photographs Are The Most Curious Indicators Of Reality.

Show Me A Woman Who Doesn't Feel Guilty And I'll Show You A Man.

A Poem (surely Someone Has Said This Before) Is A One-night Stand, A Short Story A Love Affair, And A Novel A Marriage.

If You Imagine The World Listening, You'll Never Write A Line. That's Why Privacy Is So Important. You Should Write First Drafts As If They Will Never Be Shown To Anyone.

The Unconscious Of An Artist Is Her Greatest Treasure. It Is What Transmutes The Dross Of Autobiography Into The Gold Of Myth.

Greatest Treasure

When I Sit Down At My Writing Desk, Time Seems To Vanish. I Think It's A Wonderful Way To Spend One's Life.

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Court, In Our Society, Is Often The Last Resort Of Stubbornness.

In Any Triangle, Who Is The Betrayer, Who The Unseen Rival, And Who The Humiliated Lover? Oneself, Oneself, And No One But Oneself!

I Understand That Unless You Have A Government Of Laws, Rather Than A Government Of People, You Cannot Protect Dissent. And I Understand, As A Woman Who Probably Would Have Been Burned In The Marketplace For Witchcraft Only About 200 Years Ago, That I Need The First Amendment More Than Anybody Does. And That Even If I Am Repelled By Child Pornography Or Bob Guccione's Productions, That I Have To Protect Those Things, Because Essentially It's In My Self-interest To Do So.

We Need Quiet Time To Examine Our Lives Openly And Honestly...spending Quiet Time Alone Gives Your Mind An Opportunity To Renew Itself And Create Order.- Susan Taylor--everyone Has A Talent. What Is Rare Is The Courage To Nurture It In Solitude And To Follow The Talent To The Dark Places Where It Leads.

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.

But Come Back In November Or December, In February Or March, When The Fog, La Nebbia, Settles Upon The City Like A Marvelous Monster, And You Will Have Little Trouble Believing That Things Can Appear And Disappear In This Labyrinthine City, Or That Time Here Could Easily Slip In Its Sprockets And Take You, Willingly Or Unwillingly, Back.

All Authors Know That Any Book Is A Casting Of Runes, A Reading Of Cards, A Map Of The Palm And Heart. We Make Up The Ocean - Then Fall In. But We Also Write The Life Raft.

You're Not Too Fat; You're Just In The Wrong Country.

Tis True That Tho' People Can Transcend Their Characters In Times Of Tranquillity, They Can Ne'er Do So In Times Of Tumult.

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.

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.

The Perfect Man Is The True Partner. Not A Bed Partner Nor A Fun Partner, But A Man Who Will Shoulder Burdens Equally With You And Possess That Quality Of Joy.

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.

Sex Doesn't Disappear, It Just Changes Forms.

I Tried To Keep Myself Away From Him By Using Con Words Like "fidelity" And "adultery", By Telling Myself That He Would Interfere With My Work, That I Had Him I'd Be Too Happy To Write. I Tried To Tell Myself I Was Hurting Bennett, Hurting Myself, Making A Spectacle Of Myself. I Was. But Nothing Helped. I Was Possessed. The Minute He Walked Into A Room And Smiled At Me, I Was A Goner.

I Have Ne'er Been In A Chamber With A Lawyer When I Did Not Wish Either To Scream With Desperation Or Else Fall Into The Deepest Of Sleeps, E'en When The Matter Concern'd My Own Future Most Profoundly.

I Stand In The Mist And Cry, Thinking Of Myself Standing In The Mist And Crying, And Wondering If I Will Ever Be Able To Use This Experience In A Book.

Writing About Sex Turns Out To Be Just Writing About Life.

Is There A Phrase In The English Language More Fraught With Menace Than A Tax Audit?

Each Artist Or Writer Who Works In Venice Comes To Believe That The City Yields Its Most Special Secret To Him Or Her Alone.

Sex Has The Unparalleled Power To Make Us Absurd To Ourselves. It Also Has The Power To Make Us Understand Transcendence.

I'm Not Classically Pretty; I've Always Been Too Heavy; I've Had Thyroid Disease And It's Very Hard For Me To Lose Weight - But I've Always Had Men Pursue Me. I've Always Had That 'it' Thing. God Knows Why. Maybe It's Pheromones, I Don't Know.

Many, Many People Have Done A Lot More Sexual Experimentation Than I Have.

Experimentation

I Think That The Joy Of Writing A Novel Is The Self-exploratio N That Emerges And Also That Wonderful Feeling Of Playing God With The Characters. When I Sit Down At My Writing Desk, Time Seems To Vanish. ... I Think The Most Important Thing For A Writer Is To Be Locked In A Study.

Whenever I Go Anywhere But Italy For A Vacation, I Always Feel Vaguely Disappointed, As If I Have Made A Mistake.

Never Follow A Dog Act. You Know You're On The Skids When You Play Yourself In The Movie Version Of Your Life.

Betrayal Betrays The Betrayer.

You Must Have A Certain Amount Of Maturity To Be A Poet. Seldom Do Sixteen-year-olds Know Themselves Well Enough.

Why Does Life Need Evidence Of Life?

Art Is Not Advocacy And Advocacy Is Not Art.

Underneath It All, You Longed To Be Annihilated By Love.

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.

Famous People Complain About Fame, But They Never Want To Give It Back, Myself Included.

I Was Surprised By My Daughter's Generation And How They Were Rebelling Against The '70s Idea That Sex Was Perfect And It Should Be Sought.

There's Another Part Of Getting Older That's Just Wonderful. Which Is You See The Way The Stories Turn Out With Peoples' Lives.

Blaming Women Is Always In Fashion.

A Dreary Censorship, And Self-censorship, Has Been Imposed On Books By The Centralization Of The Book Industry.

All My Forebears Worked For A Living. My Grandfather Painted Portraits. My Mother Too. My Aunt Painted Seascapes.

Jealousy Is All The Fun You Think They Had.

It Is The City Of Mirrors, The City Of Mirages, At Once Solid And Liquid, At Once Air And Stone.

I Am Never So Calm As After I Have Written. And The Next Morning I Will Feel The Familiar Anxiety And I Will Have To Begin The Process All Over Again.

Singularity Shows Something Wrong In The Mind.

A Man Assumes That A Woman's Refusal Is Just Part Of A Game. Or, At Any Rate, A Lot Of Men Assume That. When A Man Says No, It's No. When A Woman Says No, It's Yes, Or At Least Maybe. There Is Even A Joke To That Effect. And Little By Little, Women Begin To Believe In This View Of Themselves.

I Knew I Was In England By The Smell.

Really True Intimacy Is Rare And It Depends On Other Things Besides Sex.

Perhaps Every Generation Thinks Of Itself As A Lost Generation And Perhaps Every Generation Is Right.

I Don't Think That Sex Necessarily Produces Intimacy.

Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be. It Really Is Worth Fighting For, Being Brave For, Risking Everything For.

Everyone's A Little Crazy When You Get Inside Their Head... It's Only A Matter Of Degree.

I Have Forgotten My Rave Reviews And Memorized My Vicious Ones - Like Most Writers.

I Can Live Without It All - Love With Its Blood Pump, Sex With Its Messy Hungers, Men With Their Peacock Strutting, Their Silly Sexual Baggage, Their Wet Tongues In My Ear.

Sadly, Because Of The Enormous Gap Between Rich And Poor, Some Mothers Can Afford Helpers, But Many Can't. Those Who Can Would Be Kinder To Refrain From Criticizing Other Women.

I Think Professionalism Is Important, And Professionalism Means You Get Paid.

What Was The Point Of Spending Your Life With Someone You Were Always Looking For Ways To Decieve?

The Only People Worth Writing About Are Those About Whom The Last Word Cannot Be Said.

There Is Still The Feeling That Women's Writing Is A Lesser Class Of Writing, That What Goes On In The Nursery Or The Bedroom Is Not As Important As What Goes On In The Battlefield, That What Women Know About Is A Less Category Of Knowledge.

Coupling Doesn't Always Have To Do With Sex ... Two People Holding Each Other Up Like Flying Buttresses. Two People Depending On Each Other And Babying Each Other And Defending Each Other Against The World Outside. Sometimes It Was Worth All The Disadvantages Of Marriage Just To Have That: One Friend In An Indifferent World.

If There's Anything The World Disdains More Than Uppity Young Women, It's Uppity Old Women. Dying Young Has Always Been A Woman's Best Career Move.

I Am Not Sure If Love Is A Salve Or Just A Deeper Kind Of Wound.

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.

Images Are ... A Kind Of Emotional Shorthand.

If We Ban Whatever Offends Any Group In Our Diverse Society, We Will Soon Have No Art, No Culture, No Humor, No Satire. Satire Is By Its Nature Offensive. So Is Much Art And Political Discourse. The Value Of These Expressions Far Outweighs Their Risk.

Diverse Society

Pregnancy Seemed Like A Tremendous Abdication Of Control. Something Growing Inside You Which Would Eventually Usurp Your Life.

Blocks Usually Stem From Fear Of Being Judged. If You Imagine The World Is Listening, You'll Never Write A Line.

Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be

... What Is Great Poetry, After All, But The Continuation Of The Human Voice After Death?

Friends Love Misery... Our Misery Is What Endears Us To Our Friends.

Solitude Is Considered Un-american.

The Soul Is Awakened Through Service.

I Was Always A Feminist. My Mother Was A Feminist; My Grandmother Was A Feminist. I Always Understood Women Had To Fight Very Hard To Do What They Wanted To Do In The World - That It Wasn't An Easy Choice. But I Think The Most Important Part Is That We All Want The Right To Be Taken Seriously As Human Beings, And To Use Our Talents Without Reservation, And That's Still Not Possible For Women.

Surviving Means Being Born Over And Over.

No One To Blame! That Was Why Most People Led Lives They Hated, With People They Hated. 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. You May Be Fragmented, But You Feel Absolved Of All The Blame For It. Take Your Life In Your Own Hands, And What Happens? A Terrible Thing: No One To Blame.

Unhappiness Is Our Element. We Come To Believe We Can't Function Without It.

I See The Whole Episode In My Memory As If It Were A Very Crisply Photographed Black And White Movie. Directed By Bergman Perhaps.we Are Playing Ourselves In The Movie Version. If Only We Could Escape From Always Having To Play Ourselves !

Black And White

Women Are Their Own Worst Enemies. And Guilt Is The Main Weapon Of Self-torture . . . Show Me A Woman Who Doesn't Feel Guilty And I'll Show You A Man.

Souls Have Neither Sex Nor Colour.

People Are Terrified. A Lot Of Them Are In Relationships That Aren't Satisfying, And If You Tell Them They Can Change Their Life, They Get Really Scared.

Love Gives Without Taking

I Believe That Women Should Live For Love, For Motherhood And For Intellect, And I Believe We Shouldn't Have To Choose. And I Believe That's Always Been Difficult For Women, To Express Themselves Intellectually, Maternally, And Passionately.

We've Lost More Men To Homosexuality Than We Ever Did In Two World Wars.

It Takes A Spasm Of Love To Write A Poem.

I Am Against Censorship. I Prefer The Chaos Of Uncontrollable Communication Of All Sorts To Selective Banning Of Certain Materials. I Do Not Think Human Beings Can Be Trusted To Be Above Politics And To Promote The Common Good. One Group's Common Good Is Another Group's Evil.

Divorce Is My Generation's Coming Of Age Ceremony - A Ritual Scarring That Makes Anything That Happens Afterward Seem Bearable.

It Is For This, Partly, That I Write. How Can I Know What I Think Unless I See What I Write.

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.

I Believe That There's A Force Of Life In The Universe, And That When We're Writing Or Making Music Or Painting, We're Likely To Connect With That Flow.

A Soul Is Partly Given, Partly Wrought; Remember Always That You Are The Maker Of Your Own Soul.

It Was Easy Enough To Kill Yourself In A Fit Of Despair. It Was Easy Enough To Play The Martyr. It Was Harder To Do Nothing. To Endure Your Life. To Wait.

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.

I Think Men Have Always Been Afraid Of Women's Sexuality, And The Restrictions They Put On Women Testify To That.

Each Day That I Don't Write I Get More Fragmented.

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.

Falling In Love

Venice, That Capital City Of Dream And Intrigue, That Double City (one Above And Seemingly Solid, One Below, Wavering And Reflected In The Waters), Which Never Disappoints.

I Don't Know What The Definition Of Pornography Is And Nobody Else Does Either. Pornography Is Somebody Else's Erotica That You Don't Like. People Are Interested In Their Own Sexuality And They've Always Reflected It In Their Art. End Of Story.

You Should Write First Drafts As If They Will Never Be Shown To Anyone.

Everyone Has Talent. What Is Rare Is The Courage To Follow The Talent To The Dark Place Where It Leads.

We All Have Fantasies About Sex That Are More Perfect Than Anything In Reality.

Most Sex Is Not Really Intimate.

We Are So Scared Of Being Judged That We Look For Every Excuse To Procrastinate.

Procrastination

The Worst Thing About Jealousy Is How Low It Makes You Reach.

Fame Is Merely The Fact Of Being Misunderstood By Millions Of People.

We All Carry The Houses Of Our Youth Inside, And Our Parents, Too, Grown Small Enough To Fit Within Our Hearts.

Every Time I Catch Myself Saying, "oh No, You Shouldn't Try That," I Think, "yes, I Should."

Though My Friends Envied Me Because I Always Seemed So Cheerful And Confident, I Was Secretly Terrified Of Practically Everything.

A Book Burrows Into Your Life In A Very Profound Way Because The Experience Of Reading Is Not Passive.

Young People Never Believe In The Possibility Of Their Own Deaths. That's One Reason Old Men Can Send Them To War.

I Have Lived My Life According To This Principle: If I'm Afraid Of It, Then I Must Do It.

All People Believe Their Suffering Is Greater Than Others.

At Times It Is Strangely Sedative To Know The Extent Of Your Own Powerlessness.

Fame Means Millions Of People Have The Wrong Idea Of Who You Are.

Art Keeps One Young, I Think, Because It Keeps One Perpetually A Beginner, Perpetually A Child.

What I Discovered Was Is That It's Rare To Find A Person That You Feel Very Intimate With, And You Can Sleep With Lots Of People And Not Find What You're Looking For.

Men Must Be Stripped Of Arrogance And Women Must Become Independent For Any Mutually Nurturing Alliance To Endure Between The Sexes.

I Remember Everything But Forgive Anyway.

Remembers Everything

When You Start Having Lunch And Actually Eating, It's Already Over.

Spring, / You Are A Pinking Shears: You Cut / Fresh Edges On The World.

We Are Finally Driven To Monogamy Not By Morality But By Exhaustion.

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.

Hate Generalizes; Love Is Particular.

Women's Books Are Kind Of Discriminated Against. If A Man Writes A Book About His Family Stories, People Think Of It As Literature. If It's A Woman, She's 'spilling Her Guts,' And It's Not Art.

I Have Enormous Pride In The Survival Of The Jewish People, The Cultural Heritage Of The Jewish People, But I'm Not Observant, And I Don't Belong To A Synagogue. I Don't Go To Temple On High Holy Days, But I'm Proud To Be Jewish.

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.

I Don't Cook. My Mother Didn't Cook. My Daughter Doesn't Cook.

I'm Very Dependant. I Fall Apart Regularly.

You Can't Be Creative And Still Be A Good Girl.

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