Erica Jong Quotes
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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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My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.
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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.
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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 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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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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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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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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Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers...but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.
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Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
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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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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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I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.
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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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Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.
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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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Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.
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Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
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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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If you apologize for something that isn't your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault.
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Home is where your books are.
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It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.
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There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.
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Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.