Erica Jong Quotes - Page 2

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.
Erica Jong
Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.
Erica Jong
Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.
Erica Jong
We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.
Erica Jong
Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.
Erica Jong
The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.
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
You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.
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
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
Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.
Erica Jong
Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
Erica Jong
Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
Erica Jong
We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.
Erica Jong
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong
All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
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
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
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
Erica Jong
Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get thin. We live in a culture that is so absolutely, madly focused on commercialism and on creating money and completely turned away from any other kind of creative value. People don't generally turn to poetry unless they're bereaved or have fallen in love. Or in adolescence, when their feelings are very strong and turbulent. I think most of us are dying for lack of spirit in this culture.
Erica Jong
Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
Erica Jong
the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
Erica Jong
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