Erica Jong Quotes
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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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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
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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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Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.
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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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Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.
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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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If you don't have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don't know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
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Hate generalizes; love is particular.
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Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
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Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
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Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
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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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Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.
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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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Most sex is not really intimate.
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I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
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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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I don't think you will ever fully understand how you've touched my life and made me who I am. I don't think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star
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Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.
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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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Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.