"I only know that in our choice of friends and lovers and teachers who will change our lives, we are guided by forces which have nothing to do with the rationalizations we give."

"What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to deceive?"

"The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past."

"...the ocean kept falling into itself, gathering itself up, and falling into itself again."

"Photographs... are the most curious indicators of reality."

"Is perception equivalent to existence?"

"If you apologize for something that isn't your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault."

"Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it."

"There is a rhythm to the ending..."

"Loving someone is a loss of freedom -- but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else."

"Without sex it would be so easy to choose appropriate people to live with. Sex was the joker in an otherwise rational deck."

"Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it."

"Love is love, but marriage is an investment."

"...jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter."

"Humor is a survival tool."

"All people believe their suffering is greater than others."

"Having a baby with him meant marrying that face forever."

"I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world..."

"Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree."

"Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world."

"It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present."

"Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style."

"I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly."

"Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments."

"The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job."

"I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you."

"Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel."

"I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion."

"Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life."

"The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one."

"Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound."

"Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love..."

"My advice to a young writer: Never give up. Read everything you can read — particularly the writers who move you deeply. Study how they do what they do. Read and read and read ... and write and write and write."

"I have had the experience of having my sister get up at a meeting at Columbia University, where these scholars from all over the world were anointing Fear of Flying as a classic. And my sister got up and said, "Erica Jong has ruined my life — with her books.""

"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."

"It takes a spasm of love to write a poem."

"Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends."

"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't..."

"And what if I don't want forgiveness?"

"The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach."

"Keeping a journal implies hope."

"My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust."

"Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile."

"How could one create life with someone who represented death?"

"Majority rule will only work if you're considering individual rights. You can't have five wolves and one sheep vote on what they want to have for supper"

"This is for Larry Flynt."

"As I see it, the sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself."