Erica Jong Quotes
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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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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
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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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Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
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We write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.
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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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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.
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Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.
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Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
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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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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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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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Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
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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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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
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I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.
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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.
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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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Keeping a journal implies hope.
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No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
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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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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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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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If you apologize for something that isn't your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault.