Erica Jong Quotes

When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

It's horrible getting older. I mean, it's wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it's horrible losing your looks.

Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.

Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.

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.

Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

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

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.

Solitude is considered un-American.

Eating is never so simple as hunger.

That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn't.

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.

We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.

The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.

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.

We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.

We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly...spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order.- Susan Taylor--Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.

Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.

I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.

The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

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

Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.

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

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.

Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

I think feminism means what it has always meant - women want to use all their gifts, all their talents and be judged impartially for them. I don't think feminism has ever meant anything else.

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.

fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.

We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.

In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving -instead of actually getting up and leaving.

As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

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.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.

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.

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

the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.