Erica Jong Quotes
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Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
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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 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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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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Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
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I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
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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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Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
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My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem--then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.
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Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting.
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As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.
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I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.
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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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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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Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
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Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.
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I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
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Hate generalizes; love is particular.
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Most sex is not really intimate.
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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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That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.
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I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.
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Why does life need evidence of life?
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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.