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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.

-Erica Jong

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What Makes A Man

Erica Jong

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Don't Ye Know That Ev'ry Soul On Earth Feels Itself To Be An Orphan?

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

Having Stopped Expecting Truth, We Rarely Get It.

The Soul Is Awakened Through Service.

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

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 Remember Everything But Forgive Anyway.

Remembers Everything

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Exceptional People Are Often Called Crazy By The Ordinary World.

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.

Compose With Utter Freedom And Edit With Utter Discipline.

Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Genius Is A Strong Aphrodisiac.

But If The Gods Do Not Exist At All - Then We Are Lost,' I Said. On The Contrary - We Are Found!' Said Aesop. But When We Are Afraid, Who Can We Turn To, If Not The Gods?' Ourselves. We Turn To Ourselves Anyway. We Only Pretend There Are Gods And That They Care About Us. It Is A Comforting Falsehood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art Is Always An Energy Exchange.

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.

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.

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

Photographs Are The Most Curious Indicators Of Reality.

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

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

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

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

Very Interesting

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.

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.

Because I Loved Myself, I Was Loved.

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.

She Was Mine And Not-mine All At Once. She Was The Most Beautiful Thing I Had Ever Seen And The Most Terrifying.

Beautiful Things

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.

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

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.

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

Is Perception Equivalent To Existence?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Greatest Treasure

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments.

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.

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

The Body Is Wiser Than Its Inhabitants. The Body Is The Soul. The Body Is God’s Messenger.

At Fifty The Madwoman In The Attic Breaks Loose, Stomps Down The Stairs, And Sets Fire To The House. She Won't Be Imprisoned Anymore.

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

Love Is Love, But Marriage Is An Investment.

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

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!

Surviving Means Being Born Over And Over.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Souls Have Neither Sex Nor Colour.

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

I Look Forward And See Myself Look Back.

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

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

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

A Wet Dream In The Mind Of New York.

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.

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.

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.

Women Are Individuals In Parenting, And Why Not?

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.

Jealousy Is All The Fun You Think They Had.

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

Human Experience

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

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

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.

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

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

I Don't Think That Sex Necessarily Produces Intimacy.

We Find Our Calling Or It Finds Us, And It's A Sin Against The Fates Not To Use Your Talent When You Have 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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Was The Old Psychosomatic Side-step. Everyone In My Family Dances It At Every Opportunity. You've Given Me A Splitting Headache! You've Given Me Indigestion! You've Given Me Crotch Rot! You've Given Me Auditory Hallucinations! You've Given Me A Heart Attack! You've Given Me Cancer!

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

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

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

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.

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'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.

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.

All People Believe Their Suffering Is Greater Than Others.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I Knew I Was In England By The Smell.

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.

A New Dog Never Replaces An Old Dog, It Merely Expands The Heart.

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

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.

Hate Generalizes; Love Is Particular.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Art Is Not Advocacy And Advocacy Is Not Art.

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

How Could One Create Life With Someone Who Represented Death?

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

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.

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.

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.

Poetry Is Fired By Love.

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.

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

I Do Believe That In Every Age There Are People Whose Consciousness Transcends Their Own Time And That These People, Whether Fictional Or Historical, Are Those With Whom We Most Closely Identify And Those About Whom We Most Enjoy Reading.

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

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.

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

Most Sex Is Not Really Intimate.

Betrayal Betrays The Betrayer.

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

I Think Poetry Is The Best Thing I Do. It's Certainly The Purest. I Seem To Switch Gears Without Too Much Trouble. Non-fiction Is In Many Ways The Easiest To Write.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Always Do The Things You Fear The Most. Courage Is An Acquired Taste, Like Caviar.

Solitude Is Un-american.

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

[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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

When I Met My Husband, I Refused To Invite Him Home For Passover Because I Was Embarrassed My Mother Might Serve All The Catered Dishes In The Wrong Order.

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.

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

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

In Loving Life You Love What Can't Survive.

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.

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

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