Erica Jong Quotes

191 Sourced Quotes

Someday every woman will have orgasms — like every family has color TV — and we can all get on with the business of life.

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
Poetry... comes blood-warm straight out of the unconscious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.

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

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