Top 350 Erica Jong Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.”

— Erica Jong

252. “It’s only when you’re forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present, how much of daily life is usually spent making plans and attempting to control the future. Never mind that you have no control over it. The idea of the future is our greatest entertainment, amusement, and time-killer.”

— Erica Jong

253. “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

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

256. “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

257. “Hate generalizes; love is particular.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

264. “Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.”

— Erica Jong

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

274. “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

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

279. “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

280. “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

281. “Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.”

— Erica Jong

282. “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

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

— Erica Jong

284. “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

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

287. “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

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

— Erica Jong

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “That’s what a writer is – a conqueror of fears.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

296. “It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

298. “Children are no antidote to loneliness.”

— Erica Jong

299. “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

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

— Erica Jong