Erica Jong Quotes
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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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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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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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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
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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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The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
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Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.
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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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Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
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Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; he is afraid.
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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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Is there not an Arabick Proverb which goes, 'No one throws Stones at a Barren Tree'?
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It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.
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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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Hate generalizes; love is particular.
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There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
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The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
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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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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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It's useful to know how much society's holding you back. My mother would talk about how she was told by the head of her art school that she was the best painter, but that she wouldn't get the biggest prize because she would waste her talent by having children. I think we have to get honest with girls about how they can expect the world to block them, and we have to prepare girls, and ourselves, to break through those blocks.
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Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion for passion?
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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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Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.