Home > Author > Erica Jong
1 " Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. "
― Erica Jong , Fear of Flying
2 " I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.... "
― Erica Jong
3 " the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger. "
4 " Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man. "
5 " Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart. "
6 " 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. "
7 " Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper. "
8 " I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book. "
9 " Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. "
10 " We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate. "
― Erica Jong , Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life
11 " Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything. "
12 " Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. "
13 " Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. "
14 " The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad. "
15 " Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life. "
― Erica Jong , How to Save Your Own Life
16 " You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty. "
17 " Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover. "
18 " Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married. "
19 " We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box. "
20 " The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. "
