Top 350 Erica Jong Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.”

— Erica Jong

152. “I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching – but that won’t pay the Bergdorf’s bill. I think I’ll move to somewhere life is cheaper.”

— Erica Jong

153. “Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”

— Erica Jong

154. “You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.”

— Erica Jong

155. “Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.”

— Erica Jong

156. “I don’t believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.”

— Erica Jong

157. “Is there no Villain in this World who doth not regard himself as a poor abus’d Innocent, no She-Wolf who doth not think herself a Lamb, no Shark who doth not fancy that she is a Goldfish?”

— Erica Jong

158. “Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartednes s that requires the true courage – however often we are hurt as a result of it.”

— Erica Jong

159. “You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.”

— Erica Jong

160. “I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones – like most writers.”

— Erica Jong

161. “I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.”

— Erica Jong

162. “Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...”

— Erica Jong

163. “As women, we can’t look old. We can’t be fat. We’re supposed to look like the 14-year-old models in Vogue, who are younger and younger and skinnier and skinnier, and they are air-brushed and contoured and Photoshopped.”

— Erica Jong

164. “What I discovered was is that it’s rare to find a person that you feel very intimate with, and you can sleep with lots of people and not find what you’re looking for.”

— Erica Jong

165. “Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.”

— Erica Jong

166. “If you apologize for something that isn’t your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault.”

— Erica Jong

167. “We all deal with our fantasy lives and sometimes are disappointed by reality.”

— Erica Jong

168. “Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?”

— Erica Jong

169. “What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

171. “It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”

— Erica Jong

172. “I have enormous pride in the survival of the Jewish people, the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, but I’m not observant, and I don’t belong to a synagogue. I don’t go to temple on high holy days, but I’m proud to be Jewish.”

— Erica Jong

173. “Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.”

— Erica Jong

174. “The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.”

— Erica Jong

175. “Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.”

— Erica Jong

176. “And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.”

— Erica Jong

177. “Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you’ll never write a line.”

— Erica Jong

178. “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. – Tennessee Williams.”

— Erica Jong

179. “We don’t have a clear path forward, and that’s been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.”

— Erica Jong

180. “It’s easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.”

— Erica Jong

181. “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

182. “A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.”

— Erica Jong

183. “How could one create life with someone who represented death?”

— Erica Jong

184. “As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.”

— Erica Jong

185. “A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.”

— Erica Jong

186. “Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.”

— Erica Jong

187. “It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.”

— Erica Jong

188. “The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops – in general, doing everything men do.”

— Erica Jong

189. “A concern with ‘public morality’ is – if not the last refuge of a scoundrel – the first foray of the fascist.”

— Erica Jong

190. “Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It’s really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.”

— Erica Jong

191. “Is love freedom or is it bondage?”

— Erica Jong

192. “Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.”

— Erica Jong

193. “In any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated lover? Oneself, oneself, and no one but oneself!”

— Erica Jong

194. “The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel.”

— Erica Jong

195. “Love is serene and calm.”

— Erica Jong

196. “Eating is never so simple as hunger.”

— Erica Jong

197. “The sexuality doesn’t end. It really doesn’t. You’re sexual your whole life, if you’re a sexual person.”

— Erica Jong

198. “It’s only when you’re forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.”

— Erica Jong

199. “Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it...”

— Erica Jong

200. “Keeping a journal implies hope.”

— Erica Jong