Erica Jong Quotes
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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.
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Eating is never so simple as hunger.
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I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.
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Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.
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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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Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
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Why does life need evidence of life?
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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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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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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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Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your 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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There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.
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You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.
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Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.
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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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I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
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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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Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting.
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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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It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.
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Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.