Erica Jong Quotes
-
I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.
-
Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
-
The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
-
I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
-
Perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.
-
There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
-
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.
-
The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
-
We write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.
-
Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
-
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
-
Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."
-
it is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.
-
Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
-
As long as I'm facing the right direction, it doesn't matter the size of my steps.
-
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
-
Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
-
Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
-
The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family.
-
The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.
-
I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.