Erica Jong
I mostly hate organized religion, which I think is a force for the oppression of women and creates warfare.Collection: Hate
Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?Collection: Jobs
Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.Collection: Sex
I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.Collection: Believe
Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."Collection: Thinking
The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.Collection: Funny
Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.Collection: Goodbye
If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.Collection: Sex
In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.Collection: Passion
Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.Collection: Sex
If you don't have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don't know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.Collection: Risk
You can't be creative and still be a good girl.Collection: Girl
I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Prayer
Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.Collection: Giving
We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.Collection: Sex
I think we’re [men and women] more similar. In that we all deal with our fantasy lives and sometimes are disappointed by reality.Collection: Reality
[Henry Miller] was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation - and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Book
Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.Collection: Crazy
Venice, that capital city of dream and intrigue, that double city (one above and seemingly solid, one below, wavering and reflected in the waters), which never disappoints.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Dream
The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Writing
People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.Collection: Hard Work
Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.Collection: Faces
Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.Collection: Dog
Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.Collection: Reality
Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.Collection: Crazy
I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.Collection: Morning
Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.Collection: Simple
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.Collection: Husband
certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.Collection: People
Sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities.Collection: Sex
language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.Collection: Language
Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.Collection: Thinking
The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.Collection: Passion
I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.Collection: Love Is
Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.Collection: Strong
Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.Collection: Self
it is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.Collection: Hate
It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You've given me a splitting headache! You've given me indigestion! You've given me crotch rot! You've given me auditory hallucinations! You've given me a heart attack! You've given me cancer!Collection: Family
You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.Collection: Writing
A wet dream in the mind of New York.Collection: Dream
I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.Collection: Sadness
fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.Collection: People
This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.Collection: Long Distance Relationship
beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.Collection: Beauty
The absolute bedrock of our independence is having control over our own bodies. You cannot be independent if the government or someone else says whether or not you can use birth control. Unless you're in charge of your body, you're not in charge of anything. I think that's really the bottom line of feminism.Collection: Independent