Erica Jong Quotes
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We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.
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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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The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
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The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
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I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.
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Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
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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.
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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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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.
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Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
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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.
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You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
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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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Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
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Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."
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It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
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Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
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Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.
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Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.
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Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
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Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
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I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.
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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.