Erica Jong Quotes
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When everyone thinks they know you, it's hard not to be guarded.
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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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I think we’re men and women more similar. In that we all deal with our fantasy lives and sometimes are disappointed by reality.
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I mostly hate organized religion, which I think is a force for the oppression of women and creates warfare.
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Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.
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Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said.
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We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.
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As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?
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Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
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As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?
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The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
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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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It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
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Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
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The absolute bedrock of our independence is having control over our own bodies. You cannot be independent if the government or someone else says whether or not you can use birth control. Unless you're in charge of your body, you're not in charge of anything. I think that's really the bottom line of feminism.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
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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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... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
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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.
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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.
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If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
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Tis true that tho' People can transcend their Characters in Times of Tranquillity, they can ne'er do so in Times of Tumult.
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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.