Erica Jong Quotes

I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.

Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You've given me a splitting headache! You've given me indigestion! You've given me crotch rot! You've given me auditory hallucinations! You've given me a heart attack! You've given me cancer!

Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.

Anger is really disappointed hope.

A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.

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.

Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.

If we ban whatever offends any group in our diverse society, we will soon have no art, no culture, no humor, no satire. Satire is by its nature offensive. So is much art and political discourse. The value of these expressions far outweighs their risk.

I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.

I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.

If we don't risk anything, we risk even more.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Poetry is fired by love.

I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

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.

Love is everything it's cracked up to be

Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.

I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers...but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.

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.

Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid... They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild - and what happened? The men wilted.

There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.

Is there no Villain in this World who doth not regard himself as a poor abus'd Innocent, no She-Wolf who doth not think herself a Lamb, no Shark who doth not fancy that she is a Goldfish?

I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.

A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.

of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.

Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.

the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth.

As long as I'm facing the right direction, it doesn't matter the size of my steps.

Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then.

All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

I hope we don't have to keep going back over the same territory and winning the same rights over and over again. The battle for birth control. The battle for abortion. The parity of women's health. It's very depressing to think that you win these rights, but then you have to win them again, and again, and again, and fight the same battles over and over.

I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.