Erica Jong Quotes
-
Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.
-
As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.
-
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.
-
What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.
-
Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
-
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.
-
Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.
-
What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
-
It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
-
I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.
-
Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
-
Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.
-
Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.
-
It's horrible getting older. I mean, it's wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it's horrible losing your looks.
-
It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.
-
The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
-
It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
-
Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.
-
There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.