Top 100 Erica Jong Quotes
#1. The earth is God's book but in our blindness, we have obliterated letters so we may say God has abandoned us. It is we who are illiterate.
Erica Jong
#2. I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
#3. Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.
Erica Jong
#4. I've not ceased being fearful, I've gone ahead despite the pounding in my heart that says: turn back, turn back, you'll die if you go too far.
Erica Jong
#5. Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
Erica Jong
#6. Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.
Erica Jong
#8. I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.
Erica Jong
#9. I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.
Erica Jong
#10. Every woman artist has to kill her own grandmother. She perches on our shoulder whispering, Don't embarrass the family.
Erica Jong
#11. What I discovered was is that it's rare to find a person that you feel very intimate with, and you can sleep with lots of people and not find what you're looking for.
Erica Jong
#12. Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.
Erica Jong
#13. There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.
Erica Jong
#14. The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
Erica Jong
#15. Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.
Erica Jong
#16. Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
Erica Jong
#17. 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.
Erica Jong
#18. That's what a writer is -- a conqueror of fears.
Erica Jong
#19. We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.
Erica Jong
#20. Nothing human was worth denying. Even if it was unspeakably ugly, we could learn from it, couldn't we? Or could we? I never questioned that at all.
Erica Jong
#21. You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
Erica Jong
#22. Of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.
Erica Jong
#23. I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !
Erica Jong
#24. Is perception equivalent to existence?
Erica Jong
#25. If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
Erica Jong
#26. If I loved him, would I censor my writing to please him? If I married him, would I force my writing to be married as well?
Erica Jong
#27. I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
Erica Jong
#28. Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
Erica Jong
#29. It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.
Erica Jong
#30. When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.
Erica Jong
#31. Even now, we have laryngitis from screaming at each other: the dirty little secret of a durable marriage.
Erica Jong
#32. Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
Erica Jong
#33. Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
Erica Jong
#34. You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare
Erica Jong
#35. It is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.
Erica Jong
#36. Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.
Erica Jong
#37. The astounding energy of post-menopausal women (promised by Margaret Mead) is here, but the optimism to fuel it is not. The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees. As an image, I'm definitely getting blurry.
Erica Jong
#38. Art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.
Erica Jong
#39. 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.
Erica Jong
#40. We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.
Erica Jong
#41. Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; / he is afraid.
Erica Jong
#42. To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.
Erica Jong
#43. The trick is not how much pain you feel
but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
Erica Jong
#44. Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
Erica Jong
#45. You merely pass the time, making millennia fly by.
Erica Jong
#46. I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
Erica Jong
#47. Friends love misery ... our misery is what endears us to our friends.
Erica Jong
#48. The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.
Erica Jong
#49. Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
Erica Jong
#51. The truth is: nobody bothers to kill poets in America. It's enough to buy them in universities. Undead.
Erica Jong
#52. At times I hardly can believe in you.
Except this ache,
this longing in my gut,
this emptiness which theorizes you
because if there is emptiness this deep,
there must be fullness somewhere.
Erica Jong
#53. There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
Erica Jong
#54. I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.
Erica Jong
#55. I discovered the secret of writing - live in the present moment. Do not fantasize about possible response because you cannot know the future.
Erica Jong
#56. I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.
Erica Jong
#57. Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.
Erica Jong
#58. 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.
Erica Jong
#59. Loving someone is a loss of freedom
but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
Erica Jong
#60. Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
Erica Jong
#61. Is there not an Arabick Proverb which goes, 'No one throws Stones at a Barren Tree'?
Erica Jong
#62. I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.
Erica Jong
#63. If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.
Erica Jong
#64. My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.
Erica Jong
#65. Each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.
Erica Jong
#66. As women, we can't look old. We can't be fat. We're supposed to look like the 14-year-old models in Vogue, who are younger and younger and skinnier and skinnier, and they are air-brushed and contoured and Photoshopped.
Erica Jong
#67. Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
Erica Jong
#68. I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn't have to choose. And I believe that's always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.
Erica Jong
#69. I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.
Erica Jong
#70. I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers.
Erica Jong
#71. People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.
Erica Jong
#72. Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
Erica Jong
#73. What was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?
Erica Jong
#74. You can't be creative and still be a good girl.
Erica Jong
#75. Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
Erica Jong
#76. The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
Erica Jong
#77. Tears are a form of communication - like speech - and require a listener.
Erica Jong
#78. Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?
Erica Jong
#79. We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer - and the trouble is: you believe it.
Erica Jong
#80. Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.
Erica Jong
#81. Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
Erica Jong
#82. How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
Erica Jong
#83. Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
Erica Jong
#84. We have let Eros mean slavery, but Eros also has the power to set us free. We must demand the right to depict women's lives as we know them, not as we might like them to be. We must stop applying political prescriptions to creativity.
Erica Jong
#85. It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
Erica Jong
#86. Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.
Erica Jong
#87. Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
Erica Jong
#88. Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.
Erica Jong
#89. Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.
Erica Jong
#90. We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.
Erica Jong
#91. Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.
Erica Jong
#92. The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
Erica Jong
#93. Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have.
Erica Jong
#94. I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.
Erica Jong
#95. Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.
Erica Jong
#96. I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.
Erica Jong
#97. Solitude is considered un-American.
Erica Jong
#98. Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
Erica Jong
#99. I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?
Erica Jong
#100. She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.
Erica Jong
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