Erica Jong Quotes & Sayings

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

Mothers and daughters
it's a comedy, but also a tragedy. We fill our daughters with all the chutzpah we wish for ourselves. We want them to be free as we were not. And then we resent them for being so free. We resent them for being what we have made! With granddaughters, it's so much easier. And great-granddaughters. — Erica Jong

And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in ... underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money. — Erica Jong

In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons. — Erica Jong

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart. — Erica Jong

Rendall's first law of jealousy: jealousy does the cock harder and pussy wetter. — Erica Jong

I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone
the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten? — Erica Jong

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood. — Erica Jong

That's what a writer is -- a conqueror of fears. — Erica Jong

In any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated lover? Oneself, oneself, and no one but oneself! — Erica Jong

But we should ask the question: Why should a writer be more than a writer? Why should a writer be a guru? Why are we supposed to be psychiatrists? Isn't it enough to write and tell the truth? It's not like telling the truth is common. Writers are the earthworms of society. We aerate the soil. That's enough. — Erica Jong

I was always a feminist. My mother was a feminist; my grandmother was a feminist. I always understood women had to fight very hard to do what they wanted to do in the world - that it wasn't an easy choice. But I think the most important part is that we all want the right to be taken seriously as human beings, and to use our talents without reservation, and that's still not possible for women. — Erica Jong

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more. — Erica Jong

Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan? — Erica Jong

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit. — Erica Jong

For what angry God arching backward over the world. his anus spitting fire, the fetid breath of his mouth propelling blood-colored clouds, his navel full of burnt pitch and singed feathers, have we given our eyes, our teeth, our eyeglasses, bales of our our hair, and the magic of our worthless gold? — Erica Jong

If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs. — Erica Jong

Is love freedom or is it bondage? — Erica Jong

Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all. — Erica Jong

I am thinking of the onion again ... Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples. — Erica Jong

Souls have neither Sex nor Colour. — Erica Jong

Conflict is the soul of literature. — Erica Jong

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. — Erica Jong

All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft. — Erica Jong

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill. — Erica Jong

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

Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake. — Erica Jong

In a way women are fleshier because of estrogen. It's hard for us to lose weight because when we get super skinny we don't ovulate. Women in camps during the Holocaust didn't menstruate and didn't ovulate. They were starving; they were terrified. Why emulate that condition? It's nonsensical to me. — Erica Jong

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy. — Erica Jong

I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook. — Erica Jong

And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision. — Erica Jong

If I wrote that women could be unkind, I was considered a traitor
as if it were not worse treachery to pretend that all women were kind. — Erica Jong

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

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all. — Erica Jong

Whoever pushes America's sex button must be prepared for sirens and alarms. Whatever else we do in our lives will be drowned out by them. — Erica Jong

Did I want to dance? Of course I did and that's not all. — Erica Jong

I don't believe what you believe," I yelled, "and I don't respect your beliefs and I don't respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I'm struggling with? I don't want to live by the things you live by, I don't want that kind of life and I don't see why I should be judged by its standards. — Erica Jong

It takes a spasm of love to write a poem. — Erica Jong

If we ban whatever offends any group in our diverse society, we will soon have no art, no culture, no humor, no satire. Satire is by its nature offensive. So is much art and political discourse. The value of these expressions far outweighs their risk. — Erica Jong

The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement ... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world. — Erica Jong

We have trouble with death. We think it's un-American. We think it won't catch us. Not for us the screaming and wailing, the tearing of hair, the wearing of sackcloth and ashes. These things are thought to be "self-indulgent" - a word favored by those who most manifest it. But what is self-indulgent? What does it mean? Does it mean indulging the self to prevent its being extinguished? Does it mean holding on to one's personhood when in danger of being swept away, being swept into impersonal eternity? If so, we should indulge our screams and wails. We should give ourselves space to indulge our mourning for the individual. Whatever eternity may offer, my hunch is it won't offer individuality. Maybe this is good. Maybe individuality is pain, but let's at least mourn it when we give it up. — Erica Jong

It's important to know what you're going to spend your life on, and the only way you're going to find that is by connecting with the force inside yourself. — Erica Jong

Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people. — Erica Jong

What is the arc of the plot of one's life? I want! I want! — Erica Jong

Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes. — Erica Jong

Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ... " [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves. — Erica Jong

Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it. — Erica Jong

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

I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again. — Erica Jong

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough. — Erica Jong

Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society. — Erica Jong

Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting. — Erica Jong

I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it. — Erica Jong

Blush like you mean it — Erica Jong

As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living. — Erica Jong

I could become servile, cloying, saccharinely sweet: the whole package of lies that passes in the world as femininity. — Erica Jong

It was unimaginable what happens to you when you get known for a book that everybody reads, or that everybody has heard of. If the book is said to be sexy, the crazies come out of the woodwork. — Erica Jong

Fame turns out to be a powerful instrument of grace because it humbles its chosen victims in a hurry. You sail into it, your canvas swelled with grandiosity, and when your fifteen minutes are over and you are becalmed, you realize that grandiosity cannot take you where you need to go.
Only then do you learn to row like hell, asking God for the strength to stay afloat. — Erica Jong

Spring, / you are a pinking shears: you cut / fresh edges on the world. — Erica Jong

Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms. — Erica Jong

I remember everything but forgive anyway. — Erica Jong

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

Bullshit. You say love - but you mean security. Well, there's no such thing as security. Even if you go home to your safe little husband - there's no telling that he won't drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow or piss off with another bird or just plain stop loving you. Can you read the future? Can you predict fate? What makes you think your security is so secure? All that's sure is that if you pass up this experience, you'll never get another chance at it. Death's definitive, as you said yesterday. — Erica Jong

The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily. — Erica Jong

Certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die. — Erica Jong

Art is always an energy exchange. — Erica Jong

Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. — Erica Jong

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. — Erica Jong

...filled her memory bank with shiny coins. — Erica Jong

You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn't want to go to bed with me because I was too fat. — Erica Jong

I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy. — Erica Jong

I love to go to sleep, when bed takes me like a lover — Erica Jong

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers ... but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do. — Erica Jong

I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish. — Erica Jong

Is a currency worth anything if no one wants it? We used to buy shoes in Italy. Remember? — Erica Jong

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes. — Erica Jong

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. — Erica Jong

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. — Erica Jong

If you were lucky enough to feel safe enough to fight and struggle, then you were lucky indeed. If you felt loved enough to scream and yell and exercise your power openly, the marriage had a fifty-fifty chance. — Erica Jong

The picaresque path can probably also be a metaphor for the passage of the soul back to its creator. The thieves along the way
the thieves of money, of love, of magic, of time
are merely human obstacles to keep the traveller from perceiving that she herself is the path.
The path is as steep and as precipitous as we make it, as level and rolling as we can grade it, as steady as we are steady, as passable or impassable as our own will to pass.
In a true picaresque, the hero stops struggling and becomes the path.
At fifty, we need this knowledge most of all. — Erica Jong

What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren't for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. - Jerzy Kosinski — Erica Jong

In a sane world, love and sex would not divide by gender. We could love like and unlike beings, love them for a variety of reasons. The battered adjectives for homosexuality
queer, lesbian, gay
would disappear and we would only have people making love in different ways, with different body parts. We are too far gone with overpopulation to insist that procreation be an immutable part of desire. Desire needs only itself, not the proof of a baby. We would do well to baby each other instead of making all these unwanted babies that no one has time to nurture or to love.
At this point in my life, I am blessed by my friendships with women. I make no distinction between my gay and straight women friends. I hat the very terms, feeling that any of us could be anything
if we were to unlock the full range of possibilities within. — Erica Jong

Why is it so hard to be human being? I wonder. Why do we have to surrender? And to what? What if you refused to believe in a higher power? What if you thought you were the only trustworthy higher power? I have done that all my life and I know it doesn't work. You are not enough. Your will is not enough. But God? God is a pagan dream, conjured out of neediness. — Erica Jong

Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get thin. We live in a culture that is so absolutely, madly focused on commercialism and on creating money and completely turned away from any other kind of creative value. People don't generally turn to poetry unless they're bereaved or have fallen in love. Or in adolescence, when their feelings are very strong and turbulent. I think most of us are dying for lack of spirit in this culture. — Erica Jong

Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along. — Erica Jong

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

If we don't risk anything, we risk even more. — Erica Jong

Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have. — Erica Jong

But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said.
On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop.
But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?'
Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood. — Erica Jong

Why does life need evidence of life? — Erica Jong

The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach. — Erica Jong

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

It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present, how much of daily life is usually spent making plans and attempting to control the future. Never mind that you have no control over it. The idea of the future is our greatest entertainment, amusement, and time-killer. — Erica Jong

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

Glitch or not, we seem to need a power greater than ourselves. We seem to need enormous shadows of divinity stalking us. We know we are weak. Alcoholics are, above all, lonely, fearful pepole who make a fetish of loneliness, who think they
we
are too good to be part of the human race. And we have to be humbled to remember who we are
stumbling human beings, more ape than angel. — Erica Jong

Venice, that capital city of dream and intrigue, that double city (one above and seemingly solid, one below, wavering and reflected in the waters), which never disappoints ... — Erica Jong

No wonder the word 'feminism' was feared. It had been much too narrowly defined. I define a feminist as a self-empowering woman who wishes the same for her sisters. I do not think the term implies a certain sexual orientation, a certain style of dress or membership in a certain political party. A feminist is merely a woman who refuses to accept the notion that women's power must come through men. — Erica Jong

The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy. — Erica Jong

At thirty-nine, I learned how to change a tyre, how to shovel snow, how to stack wood. I learned how to meet a deadline without a shoulder to whine on. I became obsessed with firewood. If only there was alsways a fire in the fireplace, I knew that everything would be all right. (Prometheus must have been a women. I reverted to my ancient nature: inventing fire all day, having my liver plucked out all night.) — Erica Jong

Poetry is fired by love ... — Erica Jong