Erica Jong Quotes
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I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.
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Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
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I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.
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My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.
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Anger is really disappointed hope.
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Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
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I was always a feminist. My mother was a feminist; my grandmother was a feminist. I always understood women had to fight very hard to do what they wanted to do in the world - that it wasn't an easy choice. But I think the most important part is that we all want the right to be taken seriously as human beings, and to use our talents without reservation, and that's still not possible for women.
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The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
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Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.
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Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.
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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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It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.
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The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.
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Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then.
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There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
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I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
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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.
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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.