Erica Jong Quotes

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

If you don't have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don't know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

And what if I don't want forgiveness?

A baby's mother also needs a mother.

Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it & pass on.

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem--then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.

All people believe their suffering is greater than others.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.

I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.

But we should ask the question: Why should a writer be more than a writer? Why should a writer be a guru? Why are we supposed to be psychiatrists? Isn't it enough to write and tell the truth? It's not like telling the truth is common. Writers are the earthworms of society. We aerate the soil. That's enough.

each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.

I didn't believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one's self. In laughing even at one's need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn't feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts.

A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.

Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations.

If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I'm not talking about hygiene. I'm talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It's their scent.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.

Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.

I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn't have to choose. And I believe that's always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.

When you start having lunch and actually eating, it's already over.

I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.

From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with - a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

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.

Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.

In a way women are fleshier because of estrogen. It's hard for us to lose weight because when we get super skinny we don't ovulate. Women in camps during the Holocaust didn't menstruate and didn't ovulate. They were starving; they were terrified. Why emulate that condition? It's nonsensical to me.

When everyone thinks they know you, it's hard not to be guarded.

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.

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.

is there not an Arabick Proverb which goes, 'No one throws Stones at a Barren Tree'?

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.

Really true intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex.

We find our calling or it finds us, and it's a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.

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.

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?

I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.

language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.

I think we’re [men and women] more similar. In that we all deal with our fantasy lives and sometimes are disappointed by reality.

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.

Because I loved myself, I was loved.