Quotes from Erica Jong

Betrayal does that -- betrays the betrayer.

Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild -- and what happened? The men wilted

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

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

You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing, no one to blame.

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk more.

My reaction to porn films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

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

Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?

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

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.

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.

Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.