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Not Everybody Has To Be A Parent. In Fact, In An Overpopulated World Where Our Resources Are Shrinking, It Would Be Wonderful If People Who Didn't Want Children Felt Free To Say So. In The 1970s, There Was More Tolerance For The Idea That Not Everybody Needs To Be A Biological Parent.

-Erica Jong

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Not Everybody Has To

Erica Jong

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Not Everybody Has To Be A Parent. In Fact, In An Overpopulated World Where Our Resources Are Shrinking, It Would Be Wonderful If People Who Didn't Want Children Felt Free To Say So. In The 1970s, There Was More Tolerance For The Idea That Not Everybody Needs To Be A Biological Parent.

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Compose With Utter Freedom And Edit With Utter Discipline.

It Takes Courage To Lead A Life. Any Life.

As Women, We Can't Look Old. We Can't Be Fat. We're Supposed To Look Like The 14-year-old Models In Vogue, Who Are Younger And Younger And Skinnier And Skinnier, And They Are Air-brushed And Contoured And Photoshopped.

What Storyteller Is Adequate To Her Story? The Story Carries Us Along, Bottles On The Tide, Each With Our Secret Mesage And The Fervent Hope That It Does Not Turn Out To Be Blank.

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

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.

I Started With Poetry Because It Was Direct, Immediate, And Short. It Was The Ecstasy Of Striking Matches In The Dark.

Writers Are Doubters, Compulsives, Self-flagellants. The Torture Only Stops For Brief Moments.

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.

Birth Is The Start Of Loneliness And Loneliness The Start Of Poetry.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Home Is Where Your Books Are.

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

Conflict Is The Soul Of Literature.

Singularity Shows Something Wrong In The Mind.

One Writes Not By Will But By Surrender.

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.

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.

It's Only When You're Forbidden To Talk About The Future That You Suddenly Realize How Much The Future Normally Occupies The Present.

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

It Is A Sad Paradox That When Male Authors Impersonate Women ... They Are Said To Be Dealing With 'cosmic, Major Concerns' - But When We Impersonate Ourselves We Are Said To Be Writing 'women's Fiction' Or 'women's Poetry.

If We Don't Risk Anything, We Risk Even More.

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

Every Time We Hit An Air Pocket And The Plane Dropped About Five Hundred Feet (leaving My Stomach In My Mouth) I Vowed To Give Up Sex, Bacon, And Air Travel If I Ever Made It Back To Terra Firma In One Piece.

I Know Some Good Marriages-marriages Where Both People Are Just Trying To Get Through Their Days By Helping Each Other, Being Good To Each Other.

The Bruise On The Heart Which At First Feels Incredibly Tender To The Slightest Touch Eventually Turns All The Shades Of The Rainbow And Stops Aching. We Forget About It. We Even Forget We Have Hearts Until The Next Time. And Then We Wonder How We Ever Could Have Forgotten. We Think This One Is Better, Because, In Fact, We Cannot Fully Remember The Time Before.

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.

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.

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

I Am Old Enough To Know That Laughter, Not Anger, Is The True Revelation.

The Desire For Magic Cannot Be Eradicated. Even The Most Supposedly Rational People Attempt To Practice Magic In Love And War. We Simultaneously Possess The Most Primitive Of Brain Stems And The Most Sophisticated Of Cortices. The Imperatives Of Each Coexist Uneasily.

There Is A Rhythm To The Ending Of A Marriage Just Like The Rhythm Of A Courtship, Only Backward.

I'm Interested In What Happens To People When They Get Into That Publicity Machine. We Tend To Think Things Have Changed, But There's Still A Deep Sexism Underlying The Way Women Are Treated Publicly.

I Don't Think That Sex Necessarily Produces Intimacy.

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.

I Actually Think Leaving Your Children Alone To Fantasize, To Write, To Make Projects On Their Own Is Good For Them. Breathing Down Their Necks Is A Form Of Control. Children Should Have Their Own Space.

I Mostly Hate Organized Religion, Which I Think Is A Force For The Oppression Of Women And Creates Warfare.

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

Why Does Life Need Evidence Of Life?

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

I Think A Lot Of People, When They Read About A Woman Who Acknowledges Her Sexuality And Her Feelings, Get Really Scared. They Say They Want To Be Fearless, But In Reality They're Terrified. If They Acknowledge Their Deepest Feelings, They Might Have To Change Their Lives.

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.

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.

Not Everybody Has To Be A Parent. In Fact, In An Overpopulated World Where Our Resources Are Shrinking, It Would Be Wonderful If People Who Didn't Want Children Felt Free To Say So. In The 1970s, There Was More Tolerance For The Idea That Not Everybody Needs To Be A Biological Parent.

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

Many People Today Believe That Cynicism Requires Courage. Actually, Cynicism Is The Height Of Cowardice. It Is Innocence And Open-heartednes S That Requires The True Courage -- However Often We Are Hurt As A Result Of It.

Sex Is God's Joke On The Human Race ... If We Didn't Have Sex To Make Us Ridiculous, She Would Have Had To Think Up Something Else Instead.

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.

Turning Fifty ... Is Like Flying: Hours Of Boredom Punctuated By Moments Of Sheer Terror.

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

I Myself Hate That Old Hemingwayesque Paradigm Of The Writer As Prizefighter And I Have Tried Hard To Create An Alternate One For Myself. When Anne Sexton Admonished Me, "we Are All Writing God's Poem," I Took It To Mean There Should Be No Competition Between Writers Because We Are All Involved In A Common Project, A Common Prayer. But To Gore's And Norman's Generation, Particularly Those Male Writers Who Served In The Second World War, The Prizefighter Paradigm Remains.

Anger Is Really Disappointed Hope.

Creativity Demands Nothing Less Than All You Have. Talent Alone Is Never Enough.

Beware Of The Man Who Praises Women's Liberation; He Is About To Quit His Job.

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.

Exceptional People Are Often Called Crazy By The Ordinary World.

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. The Parity Of Women's Health. It's Very Depressing To Think That You Win These Rights, But Then You Have To Win Them Again, And Again, And Again, And Fight The Same Battles Over And Over.

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

I've Become More Conservative About Sex As I've Gotten Older.

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

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

What I Would Like To Give My Daughter Is Freedom. And This Is Something That Must Be Given By Example, Not By Exhortation.

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

There Are No Atheists On Turbulent Airplanes.

What Was Time But A Convention, A Habit Of Mind, A Custom Of Dress?

Is A Currency Worth Anything If No One Wants It? We Used To Buy Shoes In Italy. Remember?

If You've Been A Pretty Woman And Always Pursued By Lovers, Losing That And Not Having That - It Feels Like A Great Loss.

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.

To Name Oneself Is The First Act Of Both The Poet And The Revolutionary.

Isn't It Our Job To Be Appalled By Our Parents? Isn't It Every Generation's Duty To Be Dismayed By The Previous Generation? And To Assert That We Are Different - Only To Discover Later That We Are Distressingly The Same?

I Have Not Ceased Being Fearful, But I Have Ceased To Let Fear Control Me.

Fear And Courage

All People Believe Their Suffering Is Greater Than Others.

I Knew I Was In England By The Smell.

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

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

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.

Courage Is The Only Magic Worth Having.

But We Should Ask The Question: Why Should A Writer Be More Than A Writer? Why Should A Writer Be A Guru? Why Are We Supposed To Be Psychiatrists? Isn't It Enough To Write And Tell The Truth? It's Not Like Telling The Truth Is Common. Writers Are The Earthworms Of Society. We Aerate The Soil. That's Enough.

Is Perception Equivalent To Existence?

Language Can't Be Appropriated By One Person, One Poet. The Words Belong To All Of Us.

From Roman Times To The Present, Italy Has Been A Country To Fall In Love With - A Tribute To All That Is Enduring, Crazy, Pagan, Joyous, Melancholy, At Once Banal And Divine, In The Human Spirit.

Falling In Love

I Thought Of The Nameless Inventor Of The Bathtub. I Was Somehow Sure It Was A Woman. And Was The Inventor Of The Bathtub Plug A Man?

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.

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

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

Advice Is What We Ask For When We Already Know The Answer But Wish We Didn't.

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

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.

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments.

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.

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.

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.

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'?

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.

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

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

Ambivalence Is A Wonderful Tune To Dance To. It Has A Rhythm All Its Own.

What Makes A Man Love Death, Fanny? Is It Because He Hopes To Avert His Own By Watchin' The Deaths Of Others? Doth He Hope To Devour Death By Devourin' Executions With His Eyes? I'll Ne'er Understand It, If I Live To Be Eight Hundred Years. The Human Beast Is More Beast Than Human, 'tis True.

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

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

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

Men Have Always Detested Women's Gossip Because They Suspect The Truth: Their Measurements Are Being Taken And Compared.

Eating Is Never So Simple As Hunger.

Ken, My Husband, Just Smelled Like He Belonged To Me. I'm Not Talking About Hygiene. I'm Talking About When You Hug Him, He Either Feels Like A Member Of Your Tribe Or Not. It's Their Scent.

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.

Poetry Is The Inner Life Of A Culture, Its Nervous System, Its Deepest Way Of Imagining The World. A Culture That Ignores Its Poets, Chokes Off Its Nervous System And Becomes Mortally Ill.

Perhaps All Artists Were, In A Sense, Housewives: Tenders Of The Earth Household.

I Want You. I Want You. I Want You. Anything To Avoid Saying: I Love You.

There Is Simply No Dignified Way For A Woman To Live Alone. Oh, She Can Get Along Financially Perhaps (though Not Nearly As Well As A Man), But Emotionally She Is Never Left In Peace. Her Friends, Her Family, Her Fellow Workers Never Let Her Forget That Her Husbandlessness, Her Childlessness - Her Selfishness, In Short - Is A Reproach To The American Way Of Life.

We Don't Have A Clear Path Forward, And That's Been The Case For Feminism Since The 18th Century, When The Idea Of The Rights Of Women Actually Began.

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

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.

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.

In Loving Life You Love What Can't Survive.

Good Sex Is A Mystery. Perhaps Humping And Pumping Is Not A Mystery, But Good Sex Is A Mystery, And How Human Beings Become Truly Intimate Remains A Mystery.

As A Seasoned Insomniac, I Knew Sometimes The Way To Beat Sleeplessness Was To Outwit It: To Pretend You Didn't Care About Sleeping. Then Sometimes Sleep Became Piqued, Like A Rejected Lover, And Crept Up To Try To Seduce You.

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.

Isn't That The Problem? That Women Have Been Swindled For Centuries Into Substituting Adornment For Love, Fashion (as It Were) For Passion?

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.

A Concern With 'public Morality' Is - If Not The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel - The First Foray Of The Fascist.

Anybody Who Instantly Goes From Being A Poet And A Graduate Student To Being A Public Figure Has To Be In A State Of Shock. First People Want To Praise You, And Then They Want To Attack You. No One Can Prepare You For It.

I Know So Many Women In Their Fifties, Sixties And Seventies Who Delight In Being On Their Own. It's Amazing. They Don't See Any Stigma Attached To It. We Don't Need A Man To Prove Our Identity Anymore.

Blaming Women Is Always In Fashion.

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

Having Stopped Expecting Truth, We Rarely Get It.

I Thought To Spend My Declining Years Writing Poetry And Teaching - But That Won't Pay The Bergdorf's Bill. I Think I'll Move To Somewhere Life Is Cheaper.

As Long As I'm Facing The Right Direction, It Doesn't Matter The Size Of My Steps.

Throughout Much Of History, Women Writers Have Capitulated To Male Standards, And Have Paid Too Much Heed To What Virginia Woolf Calls "the Angel In The House." She Is That Little Ghost Who Sits On One's Shoulder While One Writes And Whispers, "be Nice, Don't Say Anything That Will Embarrass The Family, Don't Say Anything Your Man Will Disapprove Of ..." [ellipsis In Original] The "angel In The House" Castrates One's Creativity Because It Deprives One Of Essential Honesty, And Many Women Writers Have Yet To Win The Freedom To Be Honest With Themselves.

Genius Is A Strong Aphrodisiac.

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.

I Think Feminism Means What It Has Always Meant - Women Want To Use All Their Gifts, All Their Talents And Be Judged Impartially For Them. I Don't Think Feminism Has Ever Meant Anything Else.

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

Mediocre Prose Might Be Read As An Escape, Might Be Spoken On Television By Actors, Or Mouthed In Movies. But Mediocre Poetry Did Not Exist At All. If Poetry Wasn't Good, It Wasn't Poetry. It Was That Simple.

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

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.

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

Greatest Treasure

The Soul Is Awakened Through Service.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I Don't Think That I Had Any Idea That 'fear Of Flying' Would Become A Part Of The Culture. I Had No Idea That It Would Go All Over The World And Be Published In Chinese And Serbo-croat And So On.

Is There No Villain In This World Who Doth Not Regard Himself As A Poor Abus'd Innocent, No She-wolf Who Doth Not Think Herself A Lamb, No Shark Who Doth Not Fancy That She Is A Goldfish?

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

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

I've Kept Journals At Many Times In My Life Starting From When I Was About 13 Or 14. But It's Boring And Contrived To Keep A Journal Every Day. Better To Write As The Mood Strikes.

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.

It's Easier To Write About Pain Than About Joy. Joy Is Wordless.

Sometimes It Was Worth All The Disadvantages Of Marriage Just To Have That: One Friend In An Indifferent World.

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.

Perhaps It Is Because Venice Is Both Liquid And Solid, Both Air And Stone, That It Somehow Combines All The Elements Crucial To Make Our Imaginations Ignite And Turn Fantasies Into Realities.

People Always Think That History Proceeds In A Straight Line. It Doesn't. Social Attitudes Don't Change In A Straight Line. There's Always A Backlash Against Progressive Ideas.

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

Denounce Useless Guilt. Don’t Make A Cult Of Suffering. Live In The Now(or At Least The Soon). Always Do The Things You Fear Most. Courage Is An Acquired Taste Like Caviar. Trust All Joy. If The Evil Eye Fixes You In Its Gaze, Look Elsewhere. Get Ready To Be 87.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Back In The Days When Men Were Hunters And Chest Beaters And Women Spent Their Whole Lives Worrying About Pregnancy Or Dying In Childbirth, They Often Had To Be Taken Against Their Will. Men Complained That Women Were Cold, Unresponsive, Frigid... They Wanted Their Women Wanton. They Wanted Their Women Wild. Now Women Were Finally Learning To Be Wanton And Wild - And What Happened? The Men Wilted.

A Wet Dream In The Mind Of New York.

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.

My Generation Was Not Only Maligned In Book Reviews And Attacked In Graduate School But We Lived To See Our Adored And Adorable Daughters Wonder Why Feminism Had Become A Dirty Word.

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

I Think We’re [men And Women] More Similar. In That We All Deal With Our Fantasy Lives And Sometimes Are Disappointed By Reality.

There Is This Tendency To Think That If You Could Only Find The Magic Way, Then You Could Become A Poet. "tell Me How To Become A Poet. Tell Me What To Do." . . . What Makes You A Poet Is A Gift For Language, An Ability To See Into The Heart Of Things, And An Ability To Deal With Important Unconscious Material. When All These Things Come Together, You're A Poet. But There Isn't One Little Gimmick That Makes You A Poet. There Isn't Any Formula For It.

Solitude Is Considered Un-american.

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments. It Seems To Hammer You Into The Ground. It Drives You Deeper And Deeper Into Your Own Guilt. It Makes The Voices Inside Your Head Accuse You More Viciously Than Any Outside Voices Ever Could.

Driving Me Away Is Easier Than Saying Goodbye.

My Generation Had Doris Day As A Role Model, Then Gloria Steinem--then Princess Diana. We Are The Most Confused Generation.

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.

I Write Lustily And Humorously. It Isn't Calculated; It's The Way I Think. I've Invented A Writing Style That Expresses Who I Am.

We All Parent The Best We Can. Being Human, We're Ambivalent. We Want Perfection For Our Babies, But We Also Need Sleep.

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.

Most Sex Doesn't Really Bring People Together. You Have To Reach A Certain Level Of Connection, I Think, And That's Pretty Rare.

I Have Accepted Fear As A Part Of Life - Specifically The Fear Of Change... I Have Gone Ahead Despite The Pounding In The Heart That Says: Turn Back.

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

I Have A Very Sensitive Nose. I Identify With Dogs. I Understand The World Through My Nose.

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

Without The Gods, How Would I Sing?' I Asked. With Your Own Voice,' He Said.

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

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

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

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

If We Are All Made Of God, It Is Our Friends Who Remind Us. We Pass The Gift Of God To Them. They Pass It Back To Us When We Need It Most.

I Don't Necessarily Read Everything. I Read What I Need To Read To Inspire The Book I'm Trying To Finish.

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.

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.

Great Loves Have Legs And Wings. They Are Substantial. They Do Not Dissapate So Easily... Great Loves Have Staying Power. Or So I Told Myself.

Feminism Is Teaching. I've Gotten A Lot Of Pleasure Pushing Younger Writers That I've Met And Worked With.

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

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

Experimentation

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George Bancroft

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