Erica Jong Quotes
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I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
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Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; he is afraid.
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The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
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What was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?
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Why does life need evidence of life?
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When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
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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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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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Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
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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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Poetry is fired by love.
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Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
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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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certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.
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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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Most sex is not really intimate.
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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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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
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Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.
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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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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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Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.
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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.