Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.
– Erica Jong
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
– Erica Jong
If you don't risk anything you risk even more.
– Erica Jong
Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
– Erica Jong
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
– Erica Jong
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
– Erica Jong
Love is everything it's cracked up to be…It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.
– Erica Jong
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
– Erica Jong
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
– Erica Jong
Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.
– Erica Jong
Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
– Erica Jong
When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.
– Erica Jong
There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
– Erica Jong
The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
– Erica Jong
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.
– Erica Jong
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.
– Erica Jong
No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
– Erica Jong
My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.
– Erica Jong
Men and women, women and men. It will never work.
– Erica Jong
In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving - instead of actually getting up and leaving.
– Erica Jong
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.
– Erica Jong
I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.