Erica Jong Quotes
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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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My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem--then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.
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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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We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.
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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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The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.
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Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
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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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Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.
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Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.
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The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.
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Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
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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.
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I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.
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Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
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Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
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Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.
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I was surprised by my daughter's generation and how they were rebelling against the '70s idea that sex was perfect and it should be sought.