Erica Jong Quotes

Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.

Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.

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.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.

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

Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.

Solitude is considered un-American.

we all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.

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.

We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.

Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.

in freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.

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.

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

Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.

perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.

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.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

All people believe their suffering is greater than others.

I knew I was in England by the smell.

Surviving means being born over and over.

I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.

the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.

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

Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.

Men and women, women and men. It will never work.

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

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.

What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?

Love is love, but marriage is an investment.

Why does life need evidence of life?

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I'm doing something right.

I look forward and see myself look back.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

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

Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."

You can't be creative and still be a good girl.

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.

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

The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family.

It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.

Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said.