Erica Jong Quotes
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The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
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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.
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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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Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
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Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.
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Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.
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We write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.
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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
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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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Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.
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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.
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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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The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.
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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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Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.
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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.
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As long as I'm facing the right direction, it doesn't matter the size of my steps.
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It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
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I think a lot of people, when they read about a woman who acknowledges her sexuality and her feelings, get really scared. They say they want to be fearless, but in reality they're terrified. If they acknowledge their deepest feelings, they might have to change their lives.
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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.
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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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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.