“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.”

—  Erica Jong

"Into the lion's den" in The Guardian (26 October 2000) http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2000/oct/26/features11.g2

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Erica Jong 95
Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic 1942

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