Erica Jong Quotes
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Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.
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As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.
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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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The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.
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We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.
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Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.
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Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms.
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Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then.
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Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
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But come back in November or December, in February or March, when the fog, la nebbia, settles upon the city like a marvelous monster, and you will have little trouble believing that things can appear and disappear in this labyrinthine city, or that time here could easily slip in its sprockets and take you, willingly or unwillingly, back.
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The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
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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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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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Surviving means being born over and over.
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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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of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.
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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
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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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I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.
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Love is serene and calm
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The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
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Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.
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Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth.
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Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.