Erica Jong Quotes (45 Quotes)

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.

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

Little lion, lioness,
yowling for my breasts,
rowling at the moon,
how I love your lustiness,
your red face demanding,
your hungry mouth howling,
your screams, your cries
which all spell life
in large letters
the color of blood.

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

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Growing up female in America. What a liability You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas.

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

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

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.

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

Your morals are like roads through the Alps. They make these hairpin turns all the time.

Knowing as we do
our certain doom,
knowing as we do
the rarity of the gifts we gave
& received,
can we redeem
our love from the limbo,
dust it off like a fine sea trunk
found in an attic

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.

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

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

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.

But you endure & marry,
go on writing,
lose a husband, gain a husband,
go on writing,
sing & tap dance
& you go on writing,
have a child & still
you go on writing,
love a woman, love a man
& go on writing.

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

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.

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

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

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.

You endure your writing
& your life.

Solitude is un-American.

Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.

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

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.

It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.

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.

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

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.

You gave me: one book of love poems,
five years of peace
& two of pain.

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

Surviving meant being born over and over.

I love his spiritual sister
because she snatched clarity
from her murky history.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.

When I was a ten-year-old book worm 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.