Top 350 Erica Jong Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.”

— Erica Jong

203. “Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.”

— Erica Jong

204. “Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it’s braver to die old.”

— Erica Jong

205. “I could become servile, cloying, saccharinely sweet: the whole package of lies that passes in the world as femininity.”

— Erica Jong

206. “There is still the feeling that women’s writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.”

— Erica Jong

207. “It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.”

— Erica Jong

208. “I can live without it all – love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.”

— Erica Jong

209. “No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.”

— Erica Jong

210. “The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.”

— Erica Jong

211. “I’m very dependant. I fall apart regularly.”

— Erica Jong

212. “Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down – revising and embellishing as I go. I’m always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.”

— Erica Jong

213. “I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies.”

— Erica Jong

214. “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

215. “Tears are a form of communication – like speech – and require a listener.”

— Erica Jong

216. “People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven’t the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love.”

— Erica Jong

217. “I believe that there’s a force of life in the universe, and that when we’re writing or making music or painting, we’re likely to connect with that flow.”

— Erica Jong

218. “Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.”

— Erica Jong

219. “You’re not too fat; you’re just in the wrong country.”

— Erica Jong

220. “Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.”

— Erica Jong

221. “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

222. “Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.”

— Erica Jong

223. “Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.”

— Erica Jong

224. “Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.”

— Erica Jong

225. “You reach a point in life where you realize that you might as well do what you need to do, because your being loved or not being loved is really a function of the people you encounter and not of yourself. That is an immensely liberating insight.”

— Erica Jong

226. “I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?”

— Erica Jong

227. “Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?”

— Erica Jong

228. “In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.”

— Erica Jong

229. “Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting ‘Hiawatha’ and they groan.”

— Erica Jong

230. “Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

232. “I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It’s amazing. They don’t see any stigma attached to it. We don’t need a man to prove our identity anymore.”

— Erica Jong

233. “Because I loved myself, I was loved.”

— Erica Jong

234. “My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.”

— Erica Jong

235. “It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.”

— Erica Jong

236. “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

237. “We find our calling or it finds us, and it’s a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.”

— Erica Jong

238. “There’s nothing good about being ordinary. People don’t respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don’t run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity.”

— Erica Jong

239. “I discovered the secret of writing – live in the present moment. Do not fantasize about possible response because you cannot know the future.”

— Erica Jong

240. “Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?”

— Erica Jong

241. “I don’t necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I’m trying to finish.”

— Erica Jong

242. “Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.”

— Erica Jong

243. “Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.”

— Erica Jong

244. “If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.”

— Erica Jong

245. “Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.”

— Erica Jong

246. “I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.”

— Erica Jong

247. “I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.”

— Erica Jong

248. “One writes not by will but by surrender.”

— Erica Jong

249. “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

250. “Is perception equivalent to existence?”

— Erica Jong