Erica Jong Quotes
Most popular Erica Jong Quotes
Solitude is un-American.
Sex is God's joke on the human race.
Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
Courage is the only Magick worth having.
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.
Poetry . . . comes blood-warm straight out of the unconscious.
Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
Always do the things you fear the most; courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
Of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground.
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ... And it is rarer than the unicorn.
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
Your morals are like roads through the Alps. They make these hairpin turns all the time.
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward.
A writer is someone who takes the universal whore of language and turns her into a virgin again.
Pornography aspires to nothing but getting the customer off. It is the massage parlor of literature.
Everyone has talent; what is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
Loving someone is a loss of freedom — but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.
We don't expect them to tell the truth about power any more than we expect movie stars to tell the truth about love.
I often think of alcohol as a genie in a bottle. It promises everything but eventually imprisons you in the bottle itself.
Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.
Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony—a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
At fifty, the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won't be imprisoned anymore.
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.
The poems were hypnotic.... They were unapologetically female. An Amazon wrote them riding bareback. She had cut off one breast and dipped her quill in blood.
An artist or writer is a specimen human being who just goes about the world hoping to be a bundle of nerve endings that take in everything and transform it into a voice.
All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promise of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young.
Addiction is the disease of our age. It is cunning and powerful. It proceeds from our chronic spiritual hunger and is nourished by our focus on getting and spending, and on news and gossip outside ourselves.
Of all human activities, none is so useless and potentially destructive as trying to predict the future. The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
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.
It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.
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.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
Addiction is the disease of our age. It is cunning and powerful. It proceeds from our chronic spiritual hunger and is nourished by our focus on getting and spending, and on news and gossip outside ourselves.
