Erica Jong Quotes

191 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

Erica Jong
Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

Erica Jong
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
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

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

Erica Jong
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.

Erica Jong
There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.

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

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

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

Erica Jong
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
The job of the writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories.

Erica Jong
We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.

Erica Jong
The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

Erica Jong
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had...

Erica Jong
She was a college classmate of mine who became a caterer who became a conglomerate and who was famous in Connecticut for treating her employees like disposable paper plates.

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

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

Erica Jong
I only know that in our choice of friends and lovers and teachers who will change our lives, we are guided by forces which have nothing to do with the rationalizations we give.

Erica Jong
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
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
Is there no Villain in this World who doth not regard himself as a poor abus'd Innocent, no She-Wolf who doth not think herself a Lamb, no Shark who doth not fancy that she is a Goldfish?

Erica Jong