Erica Jong Quotations | Page 3

O what is it about having one's own Babe upon one's Hip that makes a Woman wish to go home to her Mother? A Desire to say: 'Look, the Circle is compleat'? A Desire to say: 'Look, I have cross'd the Divide and now am more like you'? A Desire to say: 'Look, this Babe I offer you is my most precious Gift'?

... poetry is fired by love ...

... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?

A baby's mother also needs a mother.

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

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

Love is everything it's cracked up to be

Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.

Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.

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.

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.

There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.

Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.

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

Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room.

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

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.

Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.

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

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.

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

We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly...spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order.- Susan Taylor--Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.

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

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

Conflict is the soul of literature.

Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.

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!

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

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.

Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?

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

Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.

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.

The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.

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

This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.

fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.

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

What makes a Man love Death, Fanny? Is it because he hopes to avert his own by watchin' the Deaths of others? Doth he hope to devour Death by devourin' Executions with his Eyes? I'll ne'er understand it, if I live to be eight hundred Years. The Human Beast is more Beast than Human, 'tis true ...

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

Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.

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

Eating is never so simple as hunger.

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

A baby's a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you're pregnant, or you'd probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother-how reading goes out the window and thinking too.

I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.

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.

Courage is the only Magic worth having.

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.

Hate generalizes; love is particular.

The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.

I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

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.

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

I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.

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

She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.

The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study...

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

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

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.

Love gives without taking

Love is serene and calm

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

Beware of the man who praises women's liberation; he is about to quit his job.

Solitude is considered un-American.

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

Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.

When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

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

Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.

I remember everything but forgive anyway.

You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.

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.

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.

No one to blame! That was why most people led lives they hated, with people they hated. How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

At fifty the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won't be imprisoned anymore.

My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.

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.

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

Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.

It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.

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?

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

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

Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.

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.

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 ...

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.

Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.

Art is always an energy exchange.

Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.

Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.

People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.

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.

the Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em ...

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.