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Nothing Quite Has Reality For Me Till I Write It All Down--revising And Embellishing As I Go. I'm Always Waiting For Things To Be Over So I Can Get Home And Commit Them To Paper.

-Erica Jong

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Nothing Quite Has Reality

Erica Jong

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Nothing Quite Has Reality For Me Till I Write It All Down--revising And Embellishing As I Go. I'm Always Waiting For Things To Be Over So I Can Get Home And Commit Them To Paper.

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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.

Compose With Utter Freedom And Edit With Utter Discipline.

Murky Language Means Someone Wants To Pick Your Pocket.

We Write As If Our Lives Depended Upon It. They Do.

I Convinced Myself That Sadness And Compromise Were The Ways Of The World.

In Loving Life You Love What Can't Survive.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future Is Merely A Shadow Which Blocks Out The Joys Of The Present And Emphasizes The Miseries Of The Past.

I Remember Everything But Forgive Anyway.

Remembers Everything

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.

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

Writers Are Always At The Edge Of The Inferno, And The Fire Is Licking At Our Toes. Luckily, This Turns Us On!

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

Do You Want Me To Tell You Something Really Subversive? Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be. That's Why People Are So Cynical About It. It Really Is Worth Fighting For, Being Brave For, Risking Everything For. And The Trouble Is, If You Don't Risk Anything, You Risk Even More.

The Soul Is Awakened Through Service.

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

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.

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.

You Have To Enjoy Being A Woman. Why Should Being A Woman Be Such A Negative Thing Where You Always Have To Improve Yourself? I Have Never In My Entire Life Met A Man Who Didn't Want To Go To Bed With Me Because I Was Too Fat.

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.

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

Never Joke With The Press. Irony Does Not Translate Into Newsprint.

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.

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

Dogs Come Into Our Lives To Teach Us About Love And Loyalty. They Depart To Teach Us About Loss. A New Dog Never Replaces An Old Dog; It Merely Expands The Heart. If You Have Loved Many Dogs, Your Heart Is Very Big.

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

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

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.

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 Am Not Quite Sure How Writing Changes Things, But I Know That It Does. It Is Indirect-like The Trails Of Earthworms Aerating The Earth. It Is Not Always Deliberate-like The Tails Of Glowing Dust Dragged By Comets.

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.

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

Every Time Women Make Tremendous Strides, The Right Wing Gets Terrified And Creates Laws Making It Hard To Get An Abortion Or Birth Control.

Writing Has Often Been Accompanied By Terror, Silences, And Then Wild Bursts Of Private Laughter That Suddenly Make All The Dread Seem Worthwhile.

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

Faith Is The Knowledge Of The Heart, Logick The Knowledge Of The Mind.

As Yet We Use Our Media Only For Selling Things - Including, Of Course, Political Candidates. What Will Happen When Someone Masters The Art Of Selling Souls?

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

When I'm Sitting At The Desk Not Being Able To Write Line One, It's Silence And Despair! It's Not So Easy To Put The Pen To The Legal Pad Or Type The First Sentence On The Computer Screen.

Is There Not An Arabick Proverb Which Goes, 'no One Throws Stones At A Barren Tree'?

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

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.

Conflict Is The Soul Of Literature.

A Baby's A Full Time Job For Three Adults. Nobody Tells You That When You're Pregnant, Or You'd Probably Jump Off A Bridge. Nobody Tells You How All-consuming It Is To Be A Mother-how Reading Goes Out The Window And Thinking Too.

Courage Is The Only Magic Worth Having.

And What If I Don't Want Forgiveness?

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

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

Few Women See Power As An End In Itself. The Point Of Power Is The Freedom To Cultivate Roses.

What All The Ads And Whorescopes Seemed To Imply Was That If Only You Took Proper Care Of Your Smells, Your Hair, Your Boobs, Your Eyelashes, Your Armpits, Your Crotch, Your Stars, Your Scars, Your Choice Of Scotch In Bars - You Would Meet A Beautiful Powerful, Potent, And Rich Man Who Would Satisfy Every Longing, Fill Every Hole, Make Your Heart Skip A Beat (or Stand Still), Make You Misty, And Fly You To The Moon (preferably On Gossamer Wings), Where You Would Live Totally Satisfied Forever.

Why Do Analysts Always Answer A Question With A Question?

Home Is Where Your Books Are.

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

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.

How Could One Create Life With Someone Who Represented Death?

Where Is Hollywood Located? Chiefly Between The Ears. In That Part Of The American Brain Lately Vacated By God.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments.

Critics Write Out Of Intellectual Exercise, Not Poets. Poets Write Straight From The Heart.

[henry Miller] Was Such A Scribomaniac That Even When He Lived In The Same House As Lawrence Durrell They Often Exchanged Letters. For Most Of His Life, Henry Wrote Literally Dozens Of Letters A Day To People He Could Have Easily Engaged In Conversation - And Did. The Writing Process, In Short, Was Essential. As It Is To All Real Writers, Writing Was Life And Breath To Him. He Put Out Words As A Tree Puts Out Leaves.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Only Difference Between Men And Women Is That Women Are Able To Create New Little Human Beings In Their Bodies While Simultaneously Writing Books, Driving Tractors, Working In Offices, Planting Crops - In General, Doing Everything Men Do.

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.

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.

No One Ever Found Wisdom Without Also Being A Fool.

What Is The Fatal Charm Of Italy? What Do We Find There That Can Be Found Nowhere Else? I Believe It Is A Certain Permission To Be Human, Which Other Places, Other Countries, Lost Long Ago.

There Were 117 Psychoanalysts On The Pan Am Flight To Vienna And I'd Been Treated By At Least Six Of Them. And Married A Seventh.

I Think I've Become More Cynical About Sex. Meaning, I Don't Think Sex In And Of Itself Leads To An Epiphany.

Gossip Is The Opiate Of The Oppressed.

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.

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

Women Who Bear Children Before They Establish Serious Habits Of Work, May Never Establish Them At All.

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

Sex And Creativity Are Often Seen By Dictators As Subversive Activities.

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.

Jealousy Is All The Fun You Think They Had.

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

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.

Photographs Are The Most Curious Indicators Of Reality.

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.

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.

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

I Didn't Believe In Systems. Everything Human Was Imperfect And Ultimately Absurd. What Did I Believe In Then? In Humor. In Laughing At Systems, At People, At One's Self. In Laughing Even At One's Need To Laugh All The Time. In Seeing Life As Contradictory, Many-sided, Various, Funny, Tragic, And With Moments Of Outrageous Beauty. In Seeing Life As A Fruitcake, Including Delicious Plums And Bad Peanuts, But Meant To Be Devoured Hungrily All The Same Because You Couldn't Feast On The Plums Without Also Sometimes Being Poisoned By The Peanuts.

I Don't Think That Sex Necessarily Produces Intimacy.

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

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

Fear And Courage

Harriet Van Horne He Makes Love To Me Expertly, Mechanically, Coldly... He's Pressing All My Buttons, As If I Were A Pocket Calculator.

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

Someday Every Woman Will Have Orgasms- Like Every Family Has Color Tv- And We Can All Get On With The Business Of Life.

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

Women Are Individuals In Parenting, And Why Not?

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

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.

Being A Daughter Is Only Half The Equation; Bearing One Is The Other.

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.

It Is Not Surprising That Venice Is Known Above All For Mirrors And Glass Since Venice Is The Most Narcissistic City In The World, The City That Celebrates Self-mirroring.

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.

People In The Land Of Lala Look Like Expensive Wax Fruit. And They Work Hard To Achieve That Look.

Motherhood Cannot Finally Be Delegated. Breast-feeding May Succumb To The Bottle; Cuddling, Fondling, And Paediatric Visits May Also Be Done By Fathers...but When A Child Needs A Mother To Talk To, Nobody Else But A Mother Will Do.

Hate Generalizes; Love Is Particular.

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

No 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.

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

In A World Where Women Work Three Times As Hard For Half As Much, Our Achievement Has Been Denigrated, Both Marriage And Divorce Have Turned Against Us, Our Motherhood Has Been Used As An Obstacle To Our Success, Our Passion As A Trap, Our Empathy For Others As An Excuse To Underpay Us.

Keeping A Journal Implies Hope.

Keeping A Journal

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

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?

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

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.

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?

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

There Are No Atheists On Turbulent Airplanes.

Because I Loved Myself, I Was Loved.

It Takes Courage To Lead A Life. Any Life.

Sex Doesn't Disappear, It Just Changes Forms.

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

Friends Love Misery, In Fact. Sometimes, Especially If We Are Too Lucky Or Too Successful Or Too Pretty, Our Misery Is The Only Thing That Endears Us To Our Friends.

It's Important To Know What You're Going To Spend Your Life On, And The Only Way You're Going To Find That Is By Connecting With The Force Inside Yourself.

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.

Growing Up Female In America. What A Liability! You Grew Up With Your Ears Full Of Cosmetic Ads, Love Songs, Advice Columns, Whoreoscopes, Hollywood Gossip, And Moral Dilemmas On The Level Of Tv Soap Operas. What Litanies The Advertisers Of The Good Life Chanted At You! What Curious Catechisms!

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

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

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

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.

Any System Was A Straightjacket If You Insisted On Adhering To It So Totally And Humorlessly.

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

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

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

Why Does Life Need Evidence Of Life?

Surviving Means Being Born Over And Over.

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

Venice Is Ever The Fragile Labyrinth At The Edge Of The Sea And It Reminds Us How Brief And Perilous The Journeys Of Our Lives Are; Perhaps That Is Why We Love It So. City Of Plagues And Brief Liaisons, City Of Lingering Deaths And Incendiary Loves, City Of Chimeras, Nightmares, Pigeons, Bells. You Are The Only City In The World Whose Dialect Has A Word For The Shimmer Of Canal Water Reflected On The Ceiling Of A Room.

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.

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 Best Slave Does Not Need To Be Beaten. She Beats Herself.

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.

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

Greatest Treasure

Is Perception Equivalent To Existence?

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.

A Baby's Mother Also Needs A Mother.

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

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

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

We Were Not Human Beings Going Through Spiritual Experiences; We Were Spiritual Beings Going Through Human Experiences, In Order To Grow.

Human Experience

Solitude Is Considered Un-american.

Poetry Is The Language We Speak In The Most Terrifying Or Ecstatic Passages Of Our Lives. But The Very Word Poetry Scares People. They Think Of Their Grade School Teachers Reciting 'hiawatha' And They Groan.

My Grandchildren Are Fabulous And Funny.

Flesh Is Merely A Lesson. We Learn It & Pass On.

Betrayal Betrays The Betrayer.

Every Country Gets The Circus It Deserves. Spain Gets Bullfights. Italy The Church. America Hollywood.

Art Is Not Advocacy And Advocacy Is Not Art.

Having Stopped Expecting Truth, We Rarely Get It.

Women Are Not The Richer Sex. Women Are Not Equal In Society.

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.

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.

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

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

Procrastination

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.

Images Are ... A Kind Of Emotional Shorthand.

I Never Became A Writer For The Money. I Am A Poet First. Even Getting Published Is A Miracle For Poets.

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.

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.

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

A Wet Dream In The Mind Of New York.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'?

That Was Probably The Mistake Of My Generation, That We Thought That Having Sex With Anyone Would Be Intimate And It Wasn't.

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.

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

If We Can Be Sufficient Unto Ourselves, We Need Fear No Entangling Webs.

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.

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.

Souls Have Neither Sex Nor Colour.

Genius Is A Strong Aphrodisiac.

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