Erica Jong Quotes
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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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Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
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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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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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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.
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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
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What was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?
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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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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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Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.
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It's important to know what you're going to spend your life on, and the only way you're going to find that is by connecting with the force inside yourself.
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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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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
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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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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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There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
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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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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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Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
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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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All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
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I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
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Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.
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The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family.