Erica Jong Quotes
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When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
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All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
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I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.
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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
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It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
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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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Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.
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Feminism is really the right of women to be full human beings and to not be defined only by their childbearing function. Feminism is really the right of women to be human beings. That's it, yet that's so frightening to a lot of people. A full human being wants satisfying work and love. A full human being is entitled to both, and is not simply defined by only one aspect of her being.
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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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A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.
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I'm not classically pretty; I've always been too heavy; I've had thyroid disease and it's very hard for me to lose weight - but I've always had men pursue me. I've always had that 'it' thing. God knows why. Maybe it's pheromones, I don't know.
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Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.
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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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It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You've given me a splitting headache! You've given me indigestion! You've given me crotch rot! You've given me auditory hallucinations! You've given me a heart attack! You've given me cancer!
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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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I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.
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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.
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Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
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The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
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Pleasure is terrifying because it breaks down the boundaries between people. Embracing passion means living with fear.
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Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.
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Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
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I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.
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Poetry is fired by love.