Erica Jong Quotes

Erica Jong shares blunt, thought-provoking reflections on courage, talent and taking charge of your own life.

21 quotes

1. 'Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.'

2. 'Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it ... It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for ... and the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.'

3. 'Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.'

4. '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.'

5. 'Men and women, women and men. It will never work.'

6. 'Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.'

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

8. Will you ever? I dont think you will ever fully understand how you've touched my life and made me who I am.I don't think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star.

9. Give advice to your children while they're young enough to believe you know what you're talking about.

10. Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

11. I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.

12. I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

13. I knew I was in England by the smell.

14. The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.

15. Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

16. Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have.

17. Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?

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

19. Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

20. writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

21. Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.