Top 350 Erica Jong Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.”

— Erica Jong

52. “You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare.”

— Erica Jong

53. “Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.”

— Erica Jong

54. “I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.”

— Erica Jong

55. “They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.”

— Erica Jong

56. “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

57. “The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.”

— Erica Jong

58. “The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.”

— Erica Jong

59. “What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.”

— Erica Jong

60. “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

61. “If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”

— Erica Jong

62. “The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.”

— Erica Jong

63. “I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.”

— Erica Jong

64. “Sex doesn’t disappear, it just changes forms.”

— Erica Jong

65. “Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.”

— Erica Jong

66. “Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations.”

— Erica Jong

67. “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

68. “We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.”

— Erica Jong

69. “Most sex is not really intimate.”

— Erica Jong

70. “My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.”

— Erica Jong

71. “How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.”

— Erica Jong

72. “Betrayal betrays the betrayer.”

— Erica Jong

73. “There is a rhythm to the ending...”

— Erica Jong

74. “A baby’s a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you’re pregnant, or you’d probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother-how reading goes out the window and thinking too.”

— Erica Jong

75. “Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.”

— Erica Jong

76. “The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study...”

— Erica Jong

77. “I don’t know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else’s erotica that you don’t like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they’ve always reflected it in their art. End of story.”

— Erica Jong

78. “At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.”

— Erica Jong

79. “Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.”

— Erica Jong

80. “There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.”

— Erica Jong

81. “People are terrified. A lot of them are in relationships that aren’t satisfying, and if you tell them they can change their life, they get really scared.”

— Erica Jong

82. “When everyone thinks they know you, it’s hard not to be guarded.”

— Erica Jong

83. “Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life – when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.”

— Erica Jong

84. “Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

86. “Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn’t good, it wasn’t poetry. It was that simple.”

— Erica Jong

87. “I don’t think that I had any idea that ‘Fear of Flying’ would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.”

— Erica Jong

88. “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

89. “Beware of the man who praises women’s liberation; he is about to quit his job.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

91. “Blaming women is always in fashion.”

— Erica Jong

92. “I look forward and see myself look back.”

— Erica Jong

93. “The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.”

— Erica Jong

94. “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

95. “Men and women, women and men. It will never work.”

— Erica Jong

96. “I think men have always been afraid of women’s sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.”

— Erica Jong

97. “Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.”

— Erica Jong

98. “Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.”

— Erica Jong

99. “When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.”

— Erica Jong

100. “To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.”

— Erica Jong