Top 350 Erica Jong Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.”

— Erica Jong

302. “Children are no antidote to loneliness.”

— Erica Jong

303. “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

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

— Erica Jong

305. “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

306. “I’m not classically pretty; I’ve always been too heavy; I’ve had thyroid disease and it’s very hard for me to lose weight – but I’ve always had men pursue me. I’ve always had that ‘it’ thing. God knows why. Maybe it’s pheromones, I don’t know.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

308. “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

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

— Erica Jong

310. “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

311. “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

312. “Sex just as a drive, as a hormonal drive, is not very interesting.”

— Erica Jong

313. “A person’s not free if their freedom has to be “given”.”

— Erica Jong

314. “We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.”

— Erica Jong

315. “Why should a bad marriage have been so much more compelling than no marriage? Why had I clung to my misery so? Why did I believe it was all I had?”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

317. “Mothers and daughters – it’s a comedy, but also a tragedy. We fill our daughters with all the chutzpah we wish for ourselves. We want them to be free as we were not. And then we resent them for being so free. We resent them for being what we have made! With granddaughters, it’s so much easier. And great-granddaughters.”

— Erica Jong

318. “It’s hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.”

— Erica Jong

319. “I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.”

— Erica Jong

320. “What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren’t for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. – Jerzy Kosinski.”

— Erica Jong

321. “How did I get to be a grown-up? At times, I find myself still sitting on the hillside, plotting revenge against the adult world.”

— Erica Jong

322. “I’m interested in what happens to people when they get into that publicity machine. We tend to think things have changed, but there’s still a deep sexism underlying the way women are treated publicly.”

— Erica Jong

323. “Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.”

— Erica Jong

324. “That was probably the mistake of my generation, that we thought that having sex with anyone would be intimate and it wasn’t.”

— Erica Jong

325. “You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn’t want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.”

— Erica Jong

326. “Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion.”

— Erica Jong

327. “Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.””

— Erica Jong

328. “My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.”

— Erica Jong

329. “You’re afraid of criticism,′ she says. ‘But criticism is a sign of life! You know who doesn’t get criticized? Nonentities! Only the dead escape criticism.”

— Erica Jong

330. “Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.”

— Erica Jong

331. “It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.”

— Erica Jong

332. “Feminism is teaching. I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I’ve met and worked with.”

— Erica Jong

333. “I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.”

— Erica Jong

334. “I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone – the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?”

— Erica Jong

335. “If I wrote that women could be unkind, I was considered a traitor – as if it were not worse treachery to pretend that all women were kind.”

— Erica Jong

336. “Writers are always at the edge of the inferno, and the fire is licking at our toes. Luckily, this turns us on!”

— Erica Jong

337. “Isn’t it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn’t it every generation’s duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different – only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?”

— Erica Jong

338. “We have let Eros mean slavery, but Eros also has the power to set us free. We must demand the right to depict women’s lives as we know them, not as we might like them to be. We must stop applying political prescriptions to creativity.”

— Erica Jong

339. “Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend – but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately.”

— Erica Jong

340. “Plot is just a fancy way of saying ’and then.”

— Erica Jong

341. “Nothing human was worth denying. Even if it was unspeakably ugly, we could learn from it, couldn’t we? Or could we? I never questioned that at all.”

— Erica Jong

342. “We’re programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You’re supposed to work and suffer – and the trouble is: you believe it.”

— Erica Jong

343. “Glitch or not, we seem to need a power greater than ourselves. We seem to need enormous shadows of divinity stalking us. We know we are weak. Alcoholics are, above all, lonely, fearful pepole who make a fetish of loneliness, who think they – we – are too good to be part of the human race. And we have to be humbled to remember who we are – stumbling human beings, more ape than angel.”

— Erica Jong

344. “Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can’t function without it.”

— Erica Jong

345. “When you start having lunch and actually eating, it’s already over.”

— Erica Jong

346. “In loving life you love what can’t survive...”

— Erica Jong

347. “I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, ‘the absentminded professor-’ They screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe.”

— Erica Jong

348. “Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.”

— Erica Jong

349. “Love gives without taking.”

— Erica Jong

350. “All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.”

— Erica Jong