Erica Jong Quotes

Is perception equivalent to existence?

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

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.

Betrayal does that -- betrays the betrayer.

school is a microcosm of our society's values.

Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

The myths about women were mostly ways of keeping us out of touch with our own strength, and this confused many generations of women.

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."

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

Love is love, but marriage is an investment.

I must gratefully acknowledge that the second wave of the feminist movement liberated my writing and was a liberating influence upon my whole life. How? Not by supplying me with dogma, but by making it easier for me to look into myself and assume that what I felt as a woman was also shared by other women (and men). For one of the most positive by-products of the so-called second wave of the feminist movement was its discovery of a new audience of readers-readers both female and male-who came to realize that literary history as we previously knew it was the history of the literature of the white, the affluent, the male, and that the female side of experience had been almost completely omitted (except as seen through the eyes of the traditional victors in the war between the sexes-men).

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool.

I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.

Every poem, every page of fiction I have written, has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, always uncertainty about its reception.

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.