Erica Jong quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Erica Jong

Erica Jong Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Erica Jong on Wise Famous Quotes.

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?

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

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

People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.

Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.

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

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

Men and women, women and men. It will never work.

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.

Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.

Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.

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.

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

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

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.

There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.

Having stopped expecting truth, we rarely get it.

Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.

It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.

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

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

Each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.

These bits speak history's tattered tale. How we cling to scraps, shards, sea glass- because we cannot stay.

Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.

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

It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.

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

It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.

Is there not an Arabick Proverb which goes, 'No one throws Stones at a Barren Tree'?

Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."

What is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?

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

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.

My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem
then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.

Even now, we have laryngitis from screaming at each other: the dirty little secret of a durable marriage.

Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.

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

I discovered the secret of writing - live in the present moment. Do not fantasize about possible response because you cannot know the future.

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Readers who think I have answers when all I have are a few pointed questions ...

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

Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.

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

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

Art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

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?

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

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.

If you don't risk anything, you risk more

I was glowing with health and well-being, as a woman will glow when she's been fucked four times in one day by two different men,

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.

Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.

I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.

We find our calling or it finds us, and it's a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.

Because I loved myself, I was loved.

In freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.

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

The soul is awakened through service.

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.

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

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.

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

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it ...

I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.

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

Biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

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

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

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

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

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

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.

I remember everything but forgive anyway.

This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.

Art is always an energy exchange.

Solitude is considered un-American.

Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it & pass on.

Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.

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.

I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.

The truth is: nobody bothers to kill poets in America. It's enough to buy them in universities. Undead.

Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.

Writers are always at the edge of the inferno, and the fire is licking at our toes. Luckily, this turns us on!

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

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

Sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities.

Hate generalizes; love is particular.

There's no shame in loving life above death. Otherwise I would be dead. What use would that be to the gods, who will not die themselves?