Erica Jong Quotes
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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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Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
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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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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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The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.
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We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.
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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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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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Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
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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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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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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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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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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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Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.
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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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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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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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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 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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Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."
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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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Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
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Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.