Erica Jong Quotes
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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.
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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.
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If you've been a pretty woman and always pursued by lovers, losing that and not having that - it feels like a great loss.
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When you start having lunch and actually eating, it's already over.
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In any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated lover? Oneself, oneself, and no one but oneself!
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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.
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It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
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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.
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Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.
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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.
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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.
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I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.
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We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.
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Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.
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Art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.
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A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
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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.
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Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
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She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.
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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.
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Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.
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Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
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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.
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One writes not by will but by surrender.