Erica Jong
We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.Collection: Writing
Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.Collection: Dream
we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.Collection: Hurt
I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.Collection: Dark
Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.Collection: Law
I don't believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.Collection: Believe
It's useful to know how much society's holding you back. My mother would talk about how she was told by the head of her art school that she was the best painter, but that she wouldn't get the biggest prize because she would waste her talent by having children. I think we have to get honest with girls about how they can expect the world to block them, and we have to prepare girls, and ourselves, to break through those blocks.Collection: Girl
Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.Collection: Sex
Most sex is not really intimate.Collection: Sex
It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.Collection: Glasses
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.Collection: Sleep
I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.Collection: Communication
All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.Collection: Believe
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.Collection: Vienna
I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !Collection: Memories
As women, we can't look old. We can't be fat. We're supposed to look like the 14-year-old models in Vogue, who are younger and younger and skinnier and skinnier, and they are air-brushed and contoured and Photoshopped.Collection: Years
biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.Collection: Art
Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.Collection: Faith
There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.Collection: Successful
... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?Collection: Voice
If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.Collection: Moving
We find our calling or it finds us, and it's a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.Collection: Fate
A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.Collection: Book
In any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated lover? Oneself, oneself, and no one but oneself!Collection: Infidelity
From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with - a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit.Collection: Country
I am thinking of the onion again. . . . Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.Collection: Thinking
Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.Collection: Children
The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.Collection: Meditation
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.Collection: Writing
Love gives without takingCollection: Sweet
In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.Collection: Criticism
I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.Collection: Writing
In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving -instead of actually getting up and leaving.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Wings
Love is serene and calmCollection: Love
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.Collection: Years
Solitude is considered un-American.Collection: Solitude
Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.Collection: Making Love
Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.Collection: Believe
Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.Collection: Doe
I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.Collection: Love
we all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.Collection: Family
Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.Collection: Power
I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.Collection: Character
Hate generalizes; love is particular.Collection: Love
Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!Collection: Love
Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.Collection: Sweet
The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.Collection: Law
Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.Collection: Discipline