Erica Jong Quotes
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I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !
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If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
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My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
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We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.
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We all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.
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Spring, you are a pinking shears: you cut fresh edges on the world.
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I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?
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A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
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Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
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Writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.
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biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
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The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
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Each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.
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Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.
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At fifty the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won't be imprisoned anymore.
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All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
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The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
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I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.
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When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
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I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.
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What was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?
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What storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.
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You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.
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Beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.