Erica Jong Quotes
-
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
-
Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
-
Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
-
I don't believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.
-
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.
-
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
-
Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.
-
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
-
Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting.
-
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
-
There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.
-
The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
-
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.
-
My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.
-
Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
-
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.
-
There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
-
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.
-
People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.
-
we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.
-
Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
-
Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
-
I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
-
We write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.