Erica Jong Quotes

My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.

Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote.

People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

When I write, I try to think back to what I was afraid of or what was scary to me, and try to put those feelings into books.

There is nothing I've been through in my life that I regret, or that I would go back and change. I feel like everything that happened - personally and professionally - I went through for a reason, and I learned from those things.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment.

There's always going to be life experiences that find their way into my songs.

Life happens, and I write about it wherever I am.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I'm lucky.

My life has been such a blur since I was 18, 19 years old. I haven't even had time to contemplate my own life. By forcing yourself to write your life story you learn a great deal about yourself.

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

I think my life is a movie and your life reflects your work.

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.

If I had my life to live over, I would want to be a man.

I look back on my life like everybody does but not just career. I mean I look back on my life as a whole, so I don't think that I dwell there or anything and in terms of work I hope that there is a lot in front of me.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

When I went to see certain shows when I was a kid, they changed my life. They made me tap into that place inside myself that I was unable to get to, so music is that tool, that bridge, and that's the kind of music I'm interested in making.

This record for the first time - feels like a record that really represents my whole entire life and instead of just a period of my life. And it is really kind of eye opening and it makes me feel really good to hear this record and hear all the years.

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.

I don't regret any decisions I've made in my life.

People in day-to-day life tend to skim the surface of things and be polite and careful, and that's not the language I speak. I like talking about feelings, fears and memories, anguish and joy, and I find it in music.

The last part of life is a spiritual concern. You need to find a context to put your life into, that will allow you to go through it with as much grace and balance as possible, even if there is rebellion and adventure and exploration and resistance.