Erica Jong Quotes

191 Sourced Quotes

If we ban whatever offends any group in our diverse society, we will soon have no art, no culture, no humor, no satire. Satire is by its nature offensive. So is much art and political discourse. The value of these expressions far outweighs their risk.

Erica Jong
You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.

Erica Jong
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.

Erica Jong
Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.

Erica Jong
Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.

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

Erica Jong
She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.

Erica Jong
But come back in November or December, in February or March, when the fog, la nebbia, settles upon the city like a marvelous monster, and you will have little trouble believing that things can appear and disappear in this labyrinthine city, or that time here could easily slip in its sprockets and take you, willingly or unwillingly, back.

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

Erica Jong
Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.

Erica Jong
Fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.

Erica Jong
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.

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

Erica Jong
What makes a Man love Death, Fanny? Is it because he hopes to avert his own by watchin' the Deaths of others? Doth he hope to devour Death by devourin' Executions with his Eyes? I'll ne'er understand it, if I live to be eight hundred Years. The Human Beast is more Beast than Human, 'tis true...

Erica Jong
All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

Erica Jong
Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.

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

Erica Jong
The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.

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
A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.

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
A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

Erica Jong
The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass...

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

Erica Jong
In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.

Erica Jong
Tis true that tho' People can transcend their Characters in Times of Tranquillity, they can ne'er do so in Times of Tumult.

Erica Jong
We need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.

Erica Jong
Beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.

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

Erica Jong