Erica Jong Quotes

My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust.

I have had the experience of having my sister get up at a meeting at Columbia University, where these scholars from all over the world were anointing Fear of Flying as a classic. And my sister got up and said, "Erica Jong has ruined my life — with her books."

Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.

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

My advice to a young writer: Never give up. Read everything you can read — particularly the writers who move you deeply. Study how they do what they do. Read and read and read ... and write and write and write.

I look forward and see myself look back.

Keeping a journal implies hope.

Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed.

Why does life need evidence of life?

Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.

They all cheat sooner or later. You might as well have one who isn't a bore the rest of the time.

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.

Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.

Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...