Erica Jong Quotes
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And what if I don't want forgiveness?
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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.
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What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.
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All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
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Hate generalizes; love is particular.
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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.
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Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.
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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.
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My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.
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Surviving means being born over and over.
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Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms.
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That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.
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My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem--then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.
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I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.
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Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
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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.
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I look forward and see myself look back.
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I don't think you will ever fully understand how you've touched my life and made me who I am. I don't think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star
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I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.
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We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.
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The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
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A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
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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.
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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.