Erica Jong Quotes
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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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No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
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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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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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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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I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.
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I have enormous pride in the survival of the Jewish people, the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, but I'm not observant, and I don't belong to a synagogue. I don't go to temple on high holy days, but I'm proud to be Jewish.
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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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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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Pleasure is terrifying because it breaks down the boundaries between people. Embracing passion means living with fear.
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Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.
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When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.
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You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
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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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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.
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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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I think feminism means what it has always meant - women want to use all their gifts, all their talents and be judged impartially for them. I don't think feminism has ever meant anything else.
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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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Not everybody has to be a parent. In fact, in an overpopulated world where our resources are shrinking, it would be wonderful if people who didn't want children felt free to say so. In the 1970s, there was more tolerance for the idea that not everybody needs to be a biological parent.
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I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.
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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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Hate generalizes; love is particular.
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Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
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Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.