Erica Jong Quotes

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

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

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

My advice to a young writer: Never give up. Read everything you can read — particularly the writers who move you deeply. Study how they do what they do. Read and read and read ... and write and write and write.

I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.

My job is not to paralyze myself by anticipating judgment but to do the best I can and let the judgment fall where it may.

If you apologize for something that isn't your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault.

Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.

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.

The human need for companionship and sexuality is far stronger than any intellectual theory

There is a rhythm to the ending...

Why does life need evidence of life?

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

Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed.

Is perception equivalent to existence?