Erica Jong Quotes
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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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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.
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How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
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Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting.
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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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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
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Hate generalizes; love is particular.
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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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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.
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Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
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It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
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It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
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My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.
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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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My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher." - Socrates (470-399 B.C.) "Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't
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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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Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
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Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.
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Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartednes s that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.
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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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Love is love, but marriage is an investment.
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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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Eating is never so simple as hunger.
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But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said. On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop. But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?' Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.