Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Envy, Jealousy, Principles
Anger is really disappointed hope.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Anger
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Reading
Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Gossip
Isn’t that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?
—Erica Jong
Topics: Women
My reaction to porn films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Pornography
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.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Sex, Pregnancy
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.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Friends and Friendship
Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Marriage
I was afraid to write “Fear of Flying”; ergo, I had to write it. I have lived my life according to this principle: If I’m afraid of it, then I must do it.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Anxiety, Fear
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.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Misery, Money
Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world
—Erica Jong
Topics: Marriage
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
Topics: Love, Risk, Risk-taking, Romance
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.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Giving, Kindness, Service
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life—specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown; and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in my heart that says: turn back, turn back, you’ll die if you venture too far.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Resolve, Endurance, Acceptance, Courage, Fear, Perseverance, Change, Anxiety, Moving on
Men and women, women and men; it will never work.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Women, Men & Women, Men
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. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
—Erica Jong
Topics: America, Women
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Feminism
There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness—her selfishness, in short—is a reproach to the American way of life.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Women
Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”
—Erica Jong
Topics: Trying
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.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Abilities, Work, Talents
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer, but wish we didn’t.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Wishes, Advice
Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Ability, Talent, Courage
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Pregnancy
Oh Doris Lessing, my dear—your Anna is wrong about orgasms. They are no proof of love—any more than that other Anna’s fall under the wheels of that Russian train was a proof of love. It’s all female shenanigans, cultural mishegoss, conditioning, brainwashing, male mythologizing. What does a woman want? She wants what she has been told she ought to want. Anna Wulf wants orgasm, Anna Karenina, death. Orgasm is no proof of anything. Orgasm is proof of orgasm. Someday every woman will have orgasms—like every family has color TV—and we can all get on with the real business of life.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Sex
It takes courage to live a life, any life.
—Erica Jong
Solitude is un-American.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Solitude, America
Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Men
Betrayal does that—betrays the betrayer.
—Erica Jong
Topics: One liners, Betrayal
No one to blame! That was why most people led lives they hated, with people they hated. How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Being True to Yourself, Responsibility, Confidence, Blame, Self-reliance
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Toni Morrison American Novelist
- Robin Morgan American Activist
- Willa Cather American Novelist
- Emma Goldman American Anarchist
- Emma Lazarus American Poet, Writer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Bernard Malamud American Novelist
- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Indian-born American Novelist
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