Erica Jong Quotes

school is a microcosm of our society's values.

Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.

I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.

when I look back on the years since I left college, and I try to sum up what I have learned, it is precisely that: not to fear change, not to expect my life to be immutable.

Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile.

...if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Righteousness has no place in literature. Of course the keen observer of her culture will feel deeply about the oppression she sees around her, the inhumanity of man to man, of man to woman, but her vision of it must be essentially personal, not abstractly political.

Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

Every poem, every page of fiction I have written, has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, always uncertainty about its reception.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.

Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.

There is a rhythm to the ending...

Is perception equivalent to existence?

My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust.