Erica Jong Quotes

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

Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

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

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.

Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.

We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

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

biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.

It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.

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

Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.

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

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

Courage is the only Magic worth having.

Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.

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.

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

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

Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?

Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

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

It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.

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

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

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.

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

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

In loving life you love what can't survive.

Because I loved myself, I was loved.

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 don't risk anything, we risk even more.

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

Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.

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

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.

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

A baby's mother also needs a mother.

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

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.

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

I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.

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

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