Best 379 quotes of Erica Jong on MyQuotes

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

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.

What all the ads and whorescopes seemed to imply was that if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.

What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.

What I discovered was is that it's rare to find a person that you feel very intimate with, and you can sleep with lots of people and not find what you're looking for.

What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

When everyone thinks they know you, it's hard not to be guarded.

When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.

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.

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

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.

When you start having lunch and actually eating, it's already over.

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

Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.

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.

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.

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.

Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.

Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.

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

Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

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

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.

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

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

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

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.

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

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.

All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

And what about ageing? Do men force the fear of ageing upon us -- or are we ourselves terrified because we only know one kind of power -- the power of youthful beauty? Isn't it possible that if we became comfortable with other forms of female power, men might too? In her wonderful futurist novel, He, She, and It, Marge Piercy imagines a cyborg who is taught to love the bodies of older women. A delicious proposal -- because it tells that whatever we may imagine can come true. Women often hate their own bodies. Sometimes I think that the most important things about having at least one relationship with someone of your own gender -- especially if you are a woman -- is to confront the female self-hatred and turn it into self-love.

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

As long as women are denied the priesthood, we will try to make our own rituals at our own kitchen altars and we will sew our own magical capes at our own sewing machines

At thirty-nine, I learned how to change a tyre, how to shovel snow, how to stack wood. I learned how to meet a deadline without a shoulder to whine on. I became obsessed with firewood. If only there was alsways a fire in the fireplace, I knew that everything would be all right. (Prometheus must have been a women. I reverted to my ancient nature: inventing fire all day, having my liver plucked out all night.)

Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately.

Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.

Blush like you mean it

Children are no antidote to loneliness.