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

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

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

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 took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.

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

Erica Jong
She'd a pow'rful Belief in God, whom she believ'd had a more sympathetick Ear to Black Voices than to White ones, owing to the greater Suff'rings of their Possessors.

Erica Jong
As yet we use our media only for selling things — including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?

Erica Jong
Pornography aspires to nothing but getting the customer off. It is the massage parlor of literature.

Erica Jong
I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.

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

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

Erica Jong
Without sex it would be so easy to choose appropriate people to live with. Sex was the joker in an otherwise rational deck.

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

Erica Jong
I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

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'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.

Erica Jong
It is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.

Erica Jong
... jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter.

Erica Jong
... I am sure that when we love we are better than ourselves and when we hate, worse.

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
We cannot control the Future by fearing it, howe'er much we may believe we do so. Anticipation and Worry are, in fact, quite as useless to affect our Fates as a Fortune Teller's Predictions; but, alas, that doth not prevent our Indulgence in 'em.

Erica Jong
I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.

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

Erica Jong