Top 430 Quotes & Sayings by Erica Jong - Page 2

Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.

Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I'm not talking about hygiene. I'm talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It's their scent.

I think that Sappho expresses the orphaned part of ourselves. The orphaned part of ourselves that reaches out to passion for completion. That reaches out to motherhood for completion.

I do a lot of teaching... and so I think I know how hard it is for young writers, how they have to work two jobs to survive.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

I'm interested in what happens to people when they get into that publicity machine. We tend to think things have changed, but there's still a deep sexism underlying the way women are treated publicly.

As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.

I don't think there's just one person for everyone. It would be very hard for me to be with a guy who was not bright or funny. And he'd have to see the absurdities of the world, not exactly as I see them necessarily.

I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.

It was unimaginable what happens to you when you get known for a book that everybody reads, or that everybody has heard of. If the book is said to be sexy, the crazies come out of the woodwork.

Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.

I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn't have to choose. And I believe that's always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.

I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.

Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do.

Courage is the only Magic worth having.

It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.

Really true intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex.

Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.

The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.

Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.

I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.

Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.

The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.

I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.

Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.

Love is love, but marriage is an investment.

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.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation. Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved...Freedom is...not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

Because I loved myself, I was loved.

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

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.

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

Anger is really disappointed hope.

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.

Art is always an energy exchange.

Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.

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.

The soul is awakened through service.

Why does life need evidence of life?

Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel

Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations.

Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

As long as I'm facing the right direction, it doesn't matter the size of my steps.

It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.

Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

It's horrible getting older. I mean, it's wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it's horrible losing your looks.

Conflict is the soul of literature.

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?

Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.