Quotes from Erica Jong

Hate generalizes; love is particular.

Love is serene and calm

Love is everything it's cracked up to be

I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.

Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

is there not an Arabick Proverb which goes, 'No one throws Stones at a Barren Tree'?

Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.

When you start having lunch and actually eating, it's already over.

Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

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.

Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.

Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.

As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.

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.

Having stopped expecting truth, we rarely get it.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.