Erica Jong Quotes
-
Poetry is fired by love.
-
I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.
-
Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.
-
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 !
-
The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.
-
I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
-
It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
-
When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.
-
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.
-
The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
-
Love gives without taking
-
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
-
What all the ads and whorescopes seemed to imply was that if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.
-
I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.
-
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
-
I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
-
You're not too fat; you're just in the wrong country.
-
The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
-
A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
-
Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
-
I have ne'er been in a chamber with a lawyer when I did not wish either to scream with desperation or else fall into the deepest of sleeps, e'en when the matter concern'd my own future most profoundly.
-
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
-
I think men have always been afraid of women's sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.
-
Sadly, because of the enormous gap between rich and poor, some mothers can afford helpers, but many can't. Those who can would be kinder to refrain from criticizing other women.