Erica Jong Quotes

I am thinking of the onion again ... Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.

Sometimes it seems both our kids and our parents were smarter than we were. We fell somewhere between our parents' thirties idealism and our kids' eighties cynicism. Somewhere deep down we still believe that all we need is love, love, love. Somewhere deep down we question how we got grey hair. How on earth did we get to be the grown-ups?
The wonder is that our kids are growing up
despite all that we did to destroy them.

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

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.

Anger is really disappointed hope.

Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it & pass on.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit.

O what is it about having one's own Babe upon one's Hip that makes a Woman wish to go home to her Mother? A Desire to say: 'Look, the Circle is compleat'? A Desire to say: 'Look, I have cross'd the Divide and now am more like you'? A Desire to say: 'Look, this Babe I offer you is my most precious Gift'?

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

If I loved him, would I censor my writing to please him? If I married him, would I force my writing to be married as well?

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.

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.

You're not too fat; you're just in the wrong country.

Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.

Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.

The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

A DOZEN PHALLACIES WOMEN BUY
Phallacy 3.
If you use your power to support a man, he'll always support you.
Truth
Alas, not true. It's wonderful to stand by your man, to give to the one you love, but you must never forget yourself, and your children, since he may. Being a man, he takes for granted that his needs come first. Being a woman, you take that for granted too. Don't. Protect yourself -- not with feminist rhetoric or argument, but with actions. A bank account and real estate in your own name, money put aside for your kids' education that he can't touch (or give to the next -- younger -- wife and her spawn), a profession of your own to rely on. Above all, empower yourself, and then help empower him if it pleases you to do so.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.

Denounce useless guilt. Don't make a cult of suffering. Live in the now(or at least the soon). Always do the things you fear most. Courage is an acquired taste like caviar. Trust all joy. If the evil eye fixes you in its gaze, look elsewhere. Get ready to be 87.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.

You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.

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

Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.

This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.

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

The earth is God's book but in our blindness, we have obliterated letters so we may say God has abandoned us. It is we who are illiterate.

People are terrified. A lot of them are in relationships that aren't satisfying, and if you tell them they can change their life, they get really scared.

I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.

Blaming women is always in fashion.

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.

I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.

I had noticed, for example, how all my infatuations dissolved as soon as I really became friends with a man, became sympathetic to his problems, listened to him kvetch about his wife, or ex-wives, his mother, his children. After that I would like him, perhaps even love him - but without passion.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

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.

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.

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

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.

The absolute bedrock of our independence is having control over our own bodies. You cannot be independent if the government or someone else says whether or not you can use birth control. Unless you're in charge of your body, you're not in charge of anything. I think that's really the bottom line of feminism.

I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.

As long as women are denied the priesthood, we will try to make our own rituals at our own kitchen altars and we will sew our own magical capes at our own sewing machines

He who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it.

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

Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I'm doing something right.

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.

Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love ...

We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.

Why does life need evidence of life?

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

Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have.

Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

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.

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.

Each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.

How do you help anyone die? I read with amazement the stories of people who reached a certain point of illness or of age and decided it was time to die. It seems the height of both courage and cruelty. Courage because anything so counterintuitive takes courage. And cruelty because it leaves your children wondering if they did something wrong. There's no act you can initiate that doesn't involve other people. We are all interwoven. Even the most rational suicide may come as a blow to someone else.

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.

All people believe their suffering is greater than others.

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.

I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

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.

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.

I think a lot of people, when they read about a woman who acknowledges her sexuality and her feelings, get really scared. They say they want to be fearless, but in reality they're terrified. If they acknowledge their deepest feelings, they might have to change their lives.

The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.

You're not a secretary; you're a poet. What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated? What makes you think you can avoid all conflict? What makes you think you can avoid pain? Or passion? There's something to be said for passion. Can't you ever allow yourself and forgive yourself?

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?

I think men have always been afraid of women's sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.

At certain historic moments, grandparents took on childrearing responsibilities. In many cultures, they still do. Chinese grandparents who are able to retire at 55 are seen all over Beijing bouncing grandbabies. In the United States, we can't afford to retire at 55.

Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth.

Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.

Most sex is not really intimate.

Not everybody has to be a parent. In fact, in an overpopulated world where our resources are shrinking, it would be wonderful if people who didn't want children felt free to say so. In the 1970s, there was more tolerance for the idea that not everybody needs to be a biological parent.

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

Conflict is the soul of literature.

I remember everything but forgive anyway.

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.

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

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.

I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world ...

Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?

Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.

Loving someone is a loss of freedom
but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

She lives as if she is constantly on the brink of some great fulfillment. As if she were waiting for Prince Charming to take her away "from all this". All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else?

I was surprised by my daughter's generation and how they were rebelling against the '70s idea that sex was perfect and it should be sought.

Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying.

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

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

Photographs ... are the most curious indicators of reality.

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

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.

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

In freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.

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.

women are the only group in history to be idealized into powerlessness