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
I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.
We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.
Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then.
The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.
Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
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.
The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
tis true that tho' People can transcend their Characters in Times of Tranquillity, they can ne'er do so in Times of Tumult.
In loving life you love what can't survive...
we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.