Erica Jong
65 quotes
Biography
Erica Jong is an American novelist, satirist, and poet known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism.
"Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads."
"I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back...."
"I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book."
"Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper."
"the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger."
"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."
"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.""
"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."
"Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love..."
"Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound."
"The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one."
"Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life."
"I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion."
"Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel."
"I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you."
"The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job."
"Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments."
"I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly."
"Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style."
"It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present."
"Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world."
"Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree."
"I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world..."
"Having a baby with him meant marrying that face forever."
"All people believe their suffering is greater than others."