Best 379 quotes of Erica Jong on MyQuotes

A baby's mother also needs a mother.

A baby's a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you're pregnant, or you'd probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother-how reading goes out the window and thinking too.

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

A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

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

A man assumes that a woman's refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it's no. When a woman says no, it's yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Anger is really disappointed hope.

A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.

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.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.

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.

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.

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

A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.

As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

As women, we can't look old. We can't be fat. We're supposed to look like the 14-year-old models in Vogue, who are younger and younger and skinnier and skinnier, and they are air-brushed and contoured and Photoshopped.

As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?

At certain historic moments, grandparents took on childrearing responsibilities. In many cultures, they still do. Chinese grandparents who are able to retire at 55 are seen all over Beijing bouncing grandbabies. In the United States, we can't afford to retire at 55.

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.

A wet dream in the mind of New York.

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.

Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; / he is afraid.

Beware of the man who praises women's liberation; he is about to quit his job.

beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.

biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

Blaming women is always in fashion.

Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.

Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.

But come back in November or December, in February or March, when the fog, la nebbia, settles upon the city like a marvelous monster, and you will have little trouble believing that things can appear and disappear in this labyrinthine city, or that time here could easily slip in its sprockets and take you, willingly or unwillingly, back.

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.

But we should ask the question: Why should a writer be more than a writer? Why should a writer be a guru? Why are we supposed to be psychiatrists? Isn't it enough to write and tell the truth? It's not like telling the truth is common. Writers are the earthworms of society. We aerate the soil. That's enough.

certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

Conflict is the soul of literature.

Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Courage is the only Magic worth having.

Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.