Top 350 Erica Jong Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 8

101. “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

102. “The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.”

— Erica Jong

103. “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

104. “Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.”

— Erica Jong

105. “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

106. “I think I’ve become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don’t think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.”

— Erica Jong

107. “Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I’m not talking about hygiene. I’m talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It’s their scent.”

— Erica Jong

108. “From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with – a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit.”

— Erica Jong

109. “The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family.”

— Erica Jong

110. “All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.”

— Erica Jong

111. “Having stopped expecting truth, we rarely get it.”

— Erica Jong

112. “All people believe their suffering is greater than others.”

— Erica Jong

113. “When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.”

— Erica Jong

114. “Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.”

— Erica Jong

115. “Blush like you mean it.”

— Erica Jong

116. “If you’ve been a pretty woman and always pursued by lovers, losing that and not having that – it feels like a great loss.”

— Erica Jong

117. “Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.”

— Erica Jong

118. “Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.”

— Erica Jong

119. “And what if I don’t want forgiveness?”

— Erica Jong

120. “Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.”

— Erica Jong

121. “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

122. “Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.”

— Erica Jong

123. “We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.”

— Erica Jong

124. “I’ve become more conservative about sex as I’ve gotten older.”

— Erica Jong

125. “Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.”

— Erica Jong

126. “Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.”

— Erica Jong

127. “I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.”

— Erica Jong

128. “Sadly, because of the enormous gap between rich and poor, some mothers can afford helpers, but many can’t. Those who can would be kinder to refrain from criticizing other women.”

— Erica Jong

129. “Sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities.”

— Erica Jong

130. “As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn’t write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.”

— Erica Jong

131. “My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem – then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.”

— Erica Jong

132. “Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have.”

— Erica Jong

133. “I was surprised by my daughter’s generation and how they were rebelling against the ’70s idea that sex was perfect and it should be sought.”

— Erica Jong

134. “Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.”

— Erica Jong

135. “What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.”

— Erica Jong

136. “I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world...”

— Erica Jong

137. “True intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex.”

— Erica Jong

138. “Without the gods, how would I sing?? I asked. With your own voice,? he said.”

— Erica Jong

139. “I have ne’er been in a chamber with a lawyer when I did not wish either to scream with desperation or else fall into the deepest of sleeps, e’en when the matter concern’d my own future most profoundly.”

— Erica Jong

140. “Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.”

— Erica Jong

141. “Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don’t want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don’t want to hurt people.”

— Erica Jong

142. “I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.”

— Erica Jong

143. “The truth is we all want to be known. And we’re simultaneously afraid of it. We want to be unmasked, and the person who can unmask us wins our respect.”

— Erica Jong

144. “The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.”

— Erica Jong

145. “I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.”

— Erica Jong

146. “I think poetry is the best thing I do. It’s certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.”

— Erica Jong

147. “I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.”

— Erica Jong

148. “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

149. “If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.”

— Erica Jong

150. “Since flesh can’t stay, we pass the words along.”

— Erica Jong