Erica Jong
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.Collection: Country
Love is love, but marriage is an investment.Collection: Love Is
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 ShakespeareCollection: Writing
Art is always an energy exchange.Collection: Art
The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feelCollection: Love
The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.Collection: Sexuality
We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.Collection: Spiritual
Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.Collection: Sex
It's horrible getting older. I mean, it's wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it's horrible losing your looks.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Forever
The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.Collection: Photography
Why does life need evidence of life?Collection: Doe
Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.Collection: Misery
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.Collection: Home
She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.Collection: Beautiful
we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.Collection: Writing
You're not too fat; you're just in the wrong country.Collection: Country
Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have.Collection: People
The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.Collection: Important
Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Writing
Surviving means being born over and over.Collection: Life
The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.Collection: Distance
writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.Collection: Subjects
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.Collection: Home
perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.Collection: Art
It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.Collection: Writing
Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.Collection: Writing
My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.Collection: Female Writers
Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.Collection: Memories
I have ne'er been in a chamber with a lawyer when I did not wish either to scream with desperation or else fall into the deepest of sleeps, e'en when the matter concern'd my own future most profoundly.Collection: Fall
At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.Collection: Knows
You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.Collection: Maturity
It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.Collection: Writing
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.Collection: Voice
the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.Collection: Artist
Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.Collection: Sex
Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.Collection: Ifs
Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?Collection: Phrases
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.Collection: Secret
Spring, / you are a pinking shears: you cut / fresh edges on the world.Collection: Spring
I didn't believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one's self. In laughing even at one's need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn't feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts.Collection: Believe
Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; / he is afraid.Collection: Men
I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies.Collection: Feminist
The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.Collection: Fun
The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Children
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'?Collection: Mother