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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Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without 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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You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare
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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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Writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.
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Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
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Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.
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If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
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Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
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Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."
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I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
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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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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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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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In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving -instead of actually getting up and leaving.
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We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.
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Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.
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Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
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Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.
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As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?
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We write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.
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My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.