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
Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.
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 fired by love ...
... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.
I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...
Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
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.
In loving life you love what can't survive...
The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.