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Erica Jong Quotes

born 1942 United States

Erica Jong (born 26 March 1942) is an American author and educator. Born in New York City, Jong graduated from Barnard College in 1963.

United States
20th-century poets
Activists
Authors
Educators

Also known as: Jong, Erica, Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected, Fear of Flying, How to Save Your Own Life

Random Erica Jong quote

74 quotes

school is a microcosm of our society's values.

For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement.

...I am sure that when we love we are better than ourselves and when we hate, worse.

Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)

There is a rhythm to the ending...

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.

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.

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."

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.

Fear of Flying (1973)

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 everything, you risk even more.

...jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter.

Righteousness has no place in literature. Of course the keen observer of her culture will feel deeply about the oppression she sees around her, the inhumanity of man to man, of man to woman, but her vision of it must be essentially personal, not abstractly political.

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.

Because I loved myself, I was loved.

Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)

Humor is a survival tool.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Erica Jong (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.