Quotes from Erica Jong

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

Surviving means being born over and over.

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

When everyone thinks they know you, it's hard not to be guarded.

What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?

Why does life need evidence of life?

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

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.

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.

When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

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

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.

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.

People are terrified. A lot of them are in relationships that aren't satisfying, and if you tell them they can change their life, they get really scared.

My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.

Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.

I'm interested in what happens to people when they get into that publicity machine. We tend to think things have changed, but there's still a deep sexism underlying the way women are treated publicly.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

It was unimaginable what happens to you when you get known for a book that everybody reads, or that everybody has heard of. If the book is said to be sexy, the crazies come out of the woodwork.

I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....

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.

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel