Erica Jong Quotations

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

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

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

Men and women, women and men. It will never work.

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.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I'm not talking about hygiene. I'm talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It's their scent.

I think that Sappho expresses the orphaned part of ourselves. The orphaned part of ourselves that reaches out to passion for completion. That reaches out to motherhood for completion.

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.

The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.

If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

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

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

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

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

I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.

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.

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

Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

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

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

It was unimaginable what happens to you when you get known for a book that everybody reads, or that everybody has heard of. If the book is said to be sexy, the crazies come out of the woodwork.

As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

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

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.

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

I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers.

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

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.

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.

When everyone thinks they know you, it's hard not to be guarded.

The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.

In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving -instead of actually getting up and leaving.

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.

What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.

When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.

I don't think there's just one person for everyone. It would be very hard for me to be with a guy who was not bright or funny. And he'd have to see the absurdities of the world, not exactly as I see them necessarily.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

Sadly, because of the enormous gap between rich and poor, some mothers can afford helpers, but many can't. Those who can would be kinder to refrain from criticizing other women.

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.

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

Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.

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.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

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

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

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.

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.

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.

Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.

Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.

I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.

The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

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

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

I've never been able to control my public image.

I do a lot of teaching... and so I think I know how hard it is for young writers, how they have to work two jobs to survive.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.

Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.

Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

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.

Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.

Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

One writes not by will but by surrender.

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.

Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.

There is a rhythm to the ending...

My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.

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

Anger is really disappointed hope.

If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.

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.

The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.

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

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

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.

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.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.

But we should ask the question: Why should a writer be more than a writer? Why should a writer be a guru? Why are we supposed to be psychiatrists? Isn't it enough to write and tell the truth? It's not like telling the truth is common. Writers are the earthworms of society. We aerate the soil. That's enough.

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

I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.

The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.

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

I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.

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 !

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

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it...