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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.

-Erica Jong

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What I Discovered Was

Erica Jong

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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.

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Despite All The Cynical Things Writers Have Said About Writing For Money, The Truth Is We Write For Love. That Is Why It Is So Easy To Exploit Us.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Procrastination

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Pleasure Is Terrifying Because It Breaks Down The Boundaries Between People. Embracing Passion Means Living With Fear.

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.

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.

At Certain Historic Moments, Grandparents Took On Childrearing Responsibilities. In Many Cultures, They Still Do. Chinese Grandparents Who Are Able To Retire At 55 Are Seen All Over Beijing Bouncing Grandbabies. In The United States, We Can't Afford To Retire At 55.

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

A Wet Dream In The Mind Of New York.

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

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

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.

Blaming Women Is Always In Fashion.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Most Sex Is Not Really Intimate.

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

Experimentation

There Are No Atheists On Turbulent Airplanes.

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.

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

Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be

A Baby's Mother Also Needs A Mother.

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

Solitude Is Un-american.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

There Is Nothing Fiercer Than A Failed Artist. The Energy Remains, But, Having No Outlet, It Implodes In A Great Black Fart Of Rage Which Smokes Up All The Inner Windows Of The Soul. Horrible As Successful Artists Often Are, There Is Nothing Crueler Or More Vain Than A Failed Artist.

As A Past President Of The Writers Guild, I Think Women Shouldn't Write For Free. Maybe You Have To Do It For A Time, To Make A Reputation, But I Think The Idea Of Giving Your Work Away Is The Beginning Of Authors Not Being Able To Make A Living.

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

Love Is Serene And Calm

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I Don't Think That Sex Necessarily Produces Intimacy.

My Generation Of Young Female Writers Discovered That We Could Dictate The Form And Content Of Our Own Fiction.

Art Is Always An Energy Exchange.

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!

Images Are ... A Kind Of Emotional Shorthand.

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.

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.

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

Greatest Treasure

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

You See A Lot Of Smart Guys With Dumb Women, But You Hardly Ever See A Smart Woman With A Dumb Guy.

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

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.

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments.

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.

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.

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

The Sexuality Doesn't End. It Really Doesn't. You're Sexual Your Whole Life, If You're A Sexual Person.

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?

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.

I Remember Everything But Forgive Anyway.

Remembers Everything

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

Solitude Is Considered Un-american.

Pain Is Not Love. Love Flowers; Love Gives Without Taking; Love Is Serene And Calm.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Men And Women, Women And Men. It Will Never Work.

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.

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.

Keeping A Journal Implies Hope.

Keeping A Journal

It Is The Artists Who Make The True Value Of The World, Though At Times They May Have To Starve To Do It. They Are Like Earthworms, Turning Up The Soil So Things Can Grow, Eating Dirt So That The Rest Of Us May Eat Green Shoots.

I Think The Jews Are An Amazing Group Of People And Their Survival Is Amazing.

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

Betrayal Betrays The Betrayer.

I Knew I Was In England By The Smell.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Women Tend To Be Preservers Of The Social Structure, Of Marriage. They Don't Want To Upset Their Husbands Or Their Significant Others. They Don't Want To Hurt People.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

It Takes A Spasm Of Love To Write A Poem.

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

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.

In A Way Women Are Fleshier Because Of Estrogen. It's Hard For Us To Lose Weight Because When We Get Super Skinny We Don't Ovulate. Women In Camps During The Holocaust Didn't Menstruate And Didn't Ovulate. They Were Starving; They Were Terrified. Why Emulate That Condition? It's Nonsensical To Me.

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

The Trick Is Not How Much Pain You Feel - But How Much Joy You Feel

I'm Very Dependant. I Fall Apart Regularly.

Beware Of The Man Who Denounces Psychiatrists; / He Is Afraid.

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.

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

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

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

Conflict Is The Soul Of Literature.

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

When Everyone Thinks They Know You, It's Hard Not To Be Guarded.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Sex Just As A Drive, As A Hormonal Drive, Is Not Very Interesting.

Very Interesting

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

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.

Why Does Life Need Evidence Of Life?

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.

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

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

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

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

A Book Is A Box Brimming With Incendiary Material. The Reader Strikes The Match.

Writing Is One Of The Few Professions Left Where You Take All The Responsibility For What You Do. It's Really Dangerous And Ultimately Destroys You As A Writer If You Start Thinking About Responses To Your Work Or What Your Audience Needs.

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.

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

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

Singularity Shows Something Wrong In The Mind.

Genius Is A Strong Aphrodisiac.

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

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

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 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.

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.

Sex Doesn't Disappear, It Just Changes Forms.

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

Fear And Courage

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

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

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.

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.

The Stones Themselves Are Thick With History, And Those Cats That Dash Through The Alleyways Must Surely Be The Ghosts Of The Famous Dead In Feline Disguise.

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

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

In A Bad Marriage, Friends Are The Invisible Glue. If We Have Enough Friends, We May Go On For Years, Intending To Leave, Talking About Leaving -instead Of Actually Getting Up And Leaving.

Bad Relationship

Home Is Where Your Books Are.

Murky Language Means Someone Wants To Pick Your Pocket.

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

I Look Forward And See Myself Look Back.

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.

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

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

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