EJErica Jong

90 collected words

Erica Jong

Dates not recorded

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Erica Jong / quote

02Undated

I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....

Erica Jong / quote

03Undated

the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.

Erica Jong / quote

04Undated

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

Erica Jong / quote

05Undated

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

Erica Jong / quote

06Undated

Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get thin. We live in a culture that is so absolutely, madly focused on commercialism and on creating money and completely turned away from any other kind of creative value. People don't generally turn to poetry unless they're bereaved or have fallen in love. Or in adolescence, when their feelings are very strong and turbulent. I think most of us are dying for lack of spirit in this culture.

Erica Jong / quote

07Undated

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 / quote

08Undated

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

Erica Jong / quote

09Undated

All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. 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 / quote

10Undated

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

Erica Jong / quote

11Undated

We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

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12Undated

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

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13Undated

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Erica Jong / quote

14Undated

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

Erica Jong / quote

15Undated

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Erica Jong / quote

16Undated

Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

Erica Jong / quote

17Undated

You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

Erica Jong / quote

18Undated

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

Erica Jong / quote

19Undated

Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.

Erica Jong / quote

20Undated

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

Erica Jong / quote

21Undated

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 / quote

22Undated

The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.

Erica Jong / quote

23Undated

Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.

Erica Jong / quote

24Undated

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

Erica Jong / quote