Erica Jong Quotes

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

You're not too fat; you're just in the wrong country.

I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.

Writers are always at the edge of the inferno, and the fire is licking at our toes. Luckily, this turns us on!

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

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.

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

Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

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

It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.

I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.

beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.

The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.

the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.

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.

It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.

Love gives without taking

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

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

tis true that tho' People can transcend their Characters in Times of Tranquillity, they can ne'er do so in Times of Tumult.

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.

Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.

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

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 believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.

You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.

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

The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

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.

Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; / he is afraid.

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

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

Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have.

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

The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

I think men have always been afraid of women's sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.

I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.

I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.

We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.

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

People are terrified. A lot of them are in relationships that aren't satisfying, and if you tell them they can change their life, they get really scared.

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.

If you've been a pretty woman and always pursued by lovers, losing that and not having that - it feels like a great loss.

I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.

I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....

You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.