Quotes By Erica Jong

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.

Is a currency worth anything if no one wants it? We used to buy shoes in Italy. Remember?

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.

I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers.

I remember everything but forgive anyway.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

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

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.

Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

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

Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.