Erica Jong Quotes

191 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

Erica Jong
Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.

Erica Jong
The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em...

Erica Jong
The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.

Erica Jong
I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.

Erica Jong
Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.

Erica Jong
I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

Erica Jong
As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

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