Erica Jong Quotes

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.

Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.

We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.

Having stopped expecting truth, we rarely get it.

You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn't want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.

what was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.

Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.

Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

One writes not by will but by surrender.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.

Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

Solitude is un-American.

what storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.

As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.

I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies.

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.

I understand that unless you have a government of laws, rather than a government of people, you cannot protect dissent. And I understand, as a woman who probably would have been burned in the marketplace for witchcraft only about 200 years ago, that I need the First Amendment more than anybody does. And that even if I am repelled by child pornography or Bob Guccione's productions, that I have to protect those things, because essentially it's in my self-interest to do so.

I knew I was in England by the smell.

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.

Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.

I mostly hate organized religion, which I think is a force for the oppression of women and creates warfare.

I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.

[Henry Miller] was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation - and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.

You reach a point in life where you realize that you might as well do what you need to do, because your being loved or not being loved is really a function of the people you encounter and not of yourself. That is an immensely liberating insight.

Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

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.

Venice, that capital city of dream and intrigue, that double city (one above and seemingly solid, one below, wavering and reflected in the waters), which never disappoints.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation. Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved...Freedom is...not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.

Surviving means being born over and over.

Most sex is not really intimate.

It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.

I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.