Erica Jong Quotes
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It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.
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Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?
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The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.
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Conflict is the soul of literature.
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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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From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with - a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit.
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Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
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Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
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In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
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You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn't want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.
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I didn't believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one's self. In laughing even at one's need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn't feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts.
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Art is always an energy exchange.
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You reach a point in life where you realize that you might as well do what you need to do, because your being loved or not being loved is really a function of the people you encounter and not of yourself. That is an immensely liberating insight.
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A baby's mother also needs a mother.
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They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.
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Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.
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There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship-only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.
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The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.
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Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms.
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There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.
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It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.
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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 prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.
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I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.