Erica Jong > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”
― Erica Jong

“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.”
― Erica Jong

“Anger is really disappointed hope.”
― Erica Jong

“Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.”
― Erica Jong

“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

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

“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, How to Save Your Own Life

“The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.”
― Erica Jong

“The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.”
― Erica Jong

“We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called monogamy. That's called civilization and its discontents.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.”
― Erica Jong

“And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.”
― Erica Jong

“Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.”
― Erica Jong

“I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.”
― Erica Jong

“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

“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.”
― Erica Jong

“The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.”
― Erica Jong

“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, Fear of Flying

“Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.”
― Erica Jong

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

“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go.

I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed.

"Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability . . . I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my "hunger-thump." It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that's what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked.
With your own voice,' he said.”
― Erica Jong, Sappho's Leap

“Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.”
― Erica Jong

“And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in... underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money.”
― Erica Jong

“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.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

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

“We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.”
― Erica Jong, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life

“You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.”
― Erica Jong

“Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said.
On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop.
But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?'
Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.”
― Erica Jong, Sappho's Leap

“I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it...”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“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”
― Erica Jong

“the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.”
― Erica Jong

“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.”
― Erica Jong

“The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.”
― Erica Jong

“Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“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.”
― Erica Jong

“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, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life

“Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.”
― Erica Jong, Sappho's Leap: A Novel

“I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading TOM JONES as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. . . . My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible. ”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“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 !”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

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

“If you don't risk anything, you risk more”
― Erica Jong

“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.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying