Top 350 Erica Jong Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “I don’t believe what you believe,” I yelled, “and I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I’m struggling with? I don’t want to live by the things you live by, I don’t want that kind of life and I don’t see why I should be judged by its standards.”

— Erica Jong

252. “Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.”

— Erica Jong

253. “Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.”

— Erica Jong

254. “A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.”

— Erica Jong

255. “It’s impossible to generalize about sexuality – even one’s own. The only way to keep it pure is to keep it unspoken. Keep it out of words. Words are not where sexuality lives. Without privacy, there is no ecstasy.”

— Erica Jong

256. “It’s horrible getting older. I mean, it’s wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it’s horrible losing your looks.”

— Erica Jong

257. “Men have always detested women’s gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.”

— Erica Jong

258. “Why does life need evidence of life?”

— Erica Jong

259. “Women’s books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it’s a woman, she’s ‘spilling her guts,’ and it’s not art.”

— Erica Jong

260. “Courage is the only Magic worth having.”

— Erica Jong

261. “I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn’t have to choose. And I believe that’s always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.”

— Erica Jong

262. “A good woman would have given her life to the care and feeding of her husband’s madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do.”

— Erica Jong

263. “I write lustily and humorously. It isn’t calculated; it’s the way I think. I’ve invented a writing style that expresses who I am.”

— Erica Jong

264. “The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn’t mean you can’t exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.”

— Erica Jong

265. “I don’t cook. My mother didn’t cook. My daughter doesn’t cook.”

— Erica Jong

266. “We all parent the best we can. Being human, we’re ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

268. “As yet we use our media only for selling things – including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?”

— Erica Jong

269. “As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn’t care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.”

— Erica Jong

270. “I think feminism means what it has always meant – women want to use all their gifts, all their talents and be judged impartially for them. I don’t think feminism has ever meant anything else.”

— Erica Jong

271. “A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.”

— Erica Jong

272. “No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool.”

— Erica Jong

273. “There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.”

— Erica Jong

274. “We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.”

— Erica Jong

275. “People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn’t. Social attitudes don’t change in a straight line. There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.”

— Erica Jong

276. “I’ve kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it’s boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.”

— Erica Jong

277. “There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.”

— Erica Jong

278. “Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

280. “Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.”

— Erica Jong

281. “When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it’s a wonderful way to spend one’s life.”

— Erica Jong

282. “Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.”

— Erica Jong

283. “Pleasure is terrifying because it breaks down the boundaries between people. Embracing passion means living with fear.”

— Erica Jong

284. “Is a currency worth anything if no one wants it? We used to buy shoes in Italy. Remember?”

— Erica Jong

285. “What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?”

— Erica Jong

286. “The Greeks – who knew everything – knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired.”

— Erica Jong

287. “Loving someone is a loss of freedom – but one doesn’t think of it as loss because one gains so much else.”

— Erica Jong

288. “I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.”

— Erica Jong

289. “Children are no antidote to loneliness.”

— Erica Jong

290. “It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.”

— Erica Jong

291. “You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.”

— Erica Jong

292. “When women have so absorbed the disease of sexism that they themselves can inflict it on each other, we clearly have a perfect, self-replenishing machine for the continuation of sexism. Unable to turn our assertiveness against men, we turn it against each other. Thus we remain stuck in the troubles we always had. It is imperative we renovate the machine – no, not renovate it, but smash it entirely, so that we allow women to be all they need to be.”

— Erica Jong

293. “Love is love, but marriage is an investment.”

— Erica Jong

294. “Hate generalizes; love is particular.”

— Erica Jong

295. “I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.”

— Erica Jong

296. “I don’t think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.”

— Erica Jong

297. “When I’m sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it’s silence and despair! It’s not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.”

— Erica Jong

298. “Each day that I don’t write I get more fragmented.”

— Erica Jong

299. “Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.”

— Erica Jong

300. “So there were people who got up at noon, pared their toenails, and sat naked in hotel rooms without regarding each day as an apocalypse. Amazing! If someone had burst into my room and found me naked and paring my nails, I would have died of shock. Or would I? Maybe I was stronger than I thought.”

— Erica Jong