-
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.
Erica Jong -
I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
Erica Jong
-
Beware of the man who praises women's liberation; he is about to quit his job.
Erica Jong -
It's important to know what you're going to spend your life on, and the only way you're going to find that is by connecting with the force inside yourself.
Erica Jong -
The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
Erica Jong -
When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
Erica Jong -
It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
Erica Jong -
What was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?
Erica Jong
-
Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong -
My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
Erica Jong -
I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.
Erica Jong -
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
Erica Jong
-
I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers.
Erica Jong -
Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.
Erica Jong -
biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
Erica Jong -
Feminism is really the right of women to be full human beings and to not be defined only by their childbearing function. Feminism is really the right of women to be human beings. That's it, yet that's so frightening to a lot of people. A full human being wants satisfying work and love. A full human being is entitled to both, and is not simply defined by only one aspect of her being.
Erica Jong -
If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
Erica Jong -
You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.
Erica Jong
-
It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong -
What storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.
Erica Jong -
Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
Erica Jong