Erica Jong Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I don't think you will ever fully understand how you've touched my life and made me who I am. I don't think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

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

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

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

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

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

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

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

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

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

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.

What all the ads and all the whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars—you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.

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

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 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.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.

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

Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild - and what happened? The men wilted.