Quotes from Erica Jong

You want to be a poet and not die.

The sticky buds of the weeping cherry

You're afraid he'll leave you and you'll fall apart. You don't know that you can get along without him and you're afraid to find out because then your whole potty theory will come tumbling down. You'll have to stop thinking of yourself as weak and dependent and you hate that.

I had noticed, for example, how all my infatuations dissolved as soon as I really became friends with a man, became sympathetic to his problems, listened to him kvetch about his wife, or ex-wives, his mother, his children. After that I would like him, perhaps even love him—but without passion.

Fame turns out to be a powerful instrument of grace because it humbles its chosen victims in a hurry. You sail into it, your canvas swelled with grandiosity, and when your fifteen minutes are over and you are becalmed, you realize that grandiosity cannot take you where you need to go. Only then do you learn to row like hell, asking God for the strength to stay afloat.

So there were people who got up at noon, pared their toenails, and sat naked in hotel rooms without regarding each day as an apocalypse. Amazing! If someone had burst into my room and found me naked and paring my nails, I would have died of shock. Or would I? Maybe I was stronger than I thought.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit.

If I wrote that women could be unkind, I was considered a traitor -- as if it were not worse treachery to pretend that all women were kind.

I was glowing with health and well-being, as a woman will glow when she's been fucked four times in one day by two different men

Who were my fictitious witches and what did they mean? Never ask that of yourself while writing. It may stop you cold. Just trust that if you believe in your characters, others will too. ... Whenever I thought too critically about my work, I couldn't write.

Glitch or not, we seem to need a power greater than ourselves. We seem to need enormous shadows of divinity stalking us. We know we are weak. Alcoholics are, above all, lonely, fearful pepole who make a fetish of loneliness, who think they--we--are too good to be part of the human race. And we have to be humbled to remember who we are--stumbling human beings, more ape than angel.

I discovered the secret of writing - live in the present moment. Do not fantasize about possible response because you cannot know the future.

For the taste of the fruit is the tongue´s dream, and the apple´s red is the passion of the eye

We have let Eros mean slavery, but Eros also has the power to set us free. We must demand the right to depict women's lives as we know them, not as we might like them to be. We must stop applying political prescriptions to creativity.

want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Is love freedom or is it bondage?

You must be very specific in your wishes or they'll come back to haunt you.

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 time when they need them. Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

The Greeks—who knew everything—knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired.

Todos los días son buenos, pienso, hasta los malos. Cada día es un don. El olor puede ser malo, pero habríamos de regocijarnos de tener nariz. Nadie nos prometió una nariz. Nadie nos prometió un jardín para la nariz.

Ir completamente sobria a una fiesta es algo nuevo para mí; nuevo y atemorizador. Veo demasiado, siento demasiado, me doy demasiada cuenta de las mentiras.

Is life much too long for an immortal?

filled her memory bank with shiny coins.