Erica Jong Quotes
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Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
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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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Pleasure is terrifying because it breaks down the boundaries between people. Embracing passion means living with fear.
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Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.
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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 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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That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.
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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
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Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
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Most sex is not really intimate.
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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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Why does life need evidence of life?
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I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.
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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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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
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I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
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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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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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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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Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
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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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In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.
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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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Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.