Erica Jong Quotes
-
Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.
-
Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
-
I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies.
-
Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.
-
Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
-
The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do.
-
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.
-
It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
-
I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.
-
It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.
-
Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
-
We write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.
-
The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.
-
But come back in November or December, in February or March, when the fog, la nebbia, settles upon the city like a marvelous monster, and you will have little trouble believing that things can appear and disappear in this labyrinthine city, or that time here could easily slip in its sprockets and take you, willingly or unwillingly, back.
-
I remember everything but forgive anyway.
-
I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
-
We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.
-
It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
-
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.
-
You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
-
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
-
Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
-
If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
-
I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.