Erica Jong Quotes
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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
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Poetry is fired by love.
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certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.
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The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
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Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
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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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Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
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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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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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Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.
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The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
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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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Most sex is not really intimate.
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Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.
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Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
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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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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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Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; he is afraid.
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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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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.
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It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.
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I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.
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What I discovered was is that it's rare to find a person that you feel very intimate with, and you can sleep with lots of people and not find what you're looking for.
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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.