Erica Jong Quotes
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Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.
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We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.
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I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
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I don't believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.
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We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.
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The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.
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Solitude is un-American.
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I have enormous pride in the survival of the Jewish people, the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, but I'm not observant, and I don't belong to a synagogue. I don't go to temple on high holy days, but I'm proud to be Jewish.
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Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
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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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My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.
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Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.
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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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Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
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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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If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.
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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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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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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.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.
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Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.
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I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.
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Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.