Erica Jong Quotes
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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.
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We write poems as leaves give oxygen - so we can breathe.
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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.
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It's horrible getting older. I mean, it's wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it's horrible losing your looks.
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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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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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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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Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
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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.
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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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Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.
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What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
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Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.
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I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.
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Is a currency worth anything if no one wants it? We used to buy shoes in Italy. Remember?
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A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
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Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
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Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
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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.
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The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.
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The soul is awakened through service.
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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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Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.
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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.