Erica Jong Quotes
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The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
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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 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.
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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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There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
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Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid... They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild - and what happened? The men wilted.
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What all the ads and whorescopes seemed to imply was that if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.
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Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
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Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
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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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Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
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The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
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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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It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
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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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Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.
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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.
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What makes a Man love Death, Fanny? Is it because he hopes to avert his own by watchin' the Deaths of others? Doth he hope to devour Death by devourin' Executions with his Eyes? I'll ne'er understand it, if I live to be eight hundred Years. The Human Beast is more Beast than Human, 'tis true.
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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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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.
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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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Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.
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Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.