Erica Jong
Erica Jong
Erica Jongis an American novelist and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 March 1942
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Writers are always at the edge of the inferno, and the fire is licking at our toes. Luckily, this turns us on!
I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
O what is it about having one's own Babe upon one's Hip that makes a Woman wish to go home to her Mother? A Desire to say: 'Look, the Circle is compleat'? A Desire to say: 'Look, I have cross'd the Divide and now am more like you'? A Desire to say: 'Look, this Babe I offer you is my most precious Gift'?
... poetry is fired by love ...
... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
A baby's mother also needs a mother.
You can't be creative and still be a good girl.
We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.
Love is everything it's cracked up to be
Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
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.
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.
I understand that unless you have a government of laws, rather than a government of people, you cannot protect dissent. And I understand, as a woman who probably would have been burned in the marketplace for witchcraft only about 200 years ago, that I need the First Amendment more than anybody does. And that even if I am repelled by child pornography or Bob Guccione's productions, that I have to protect those things, because essentially it's in my self-interest to do so.
There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.