Quotes from Erica Jong

Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

I think we're [men and women] more similar. In that we all deal with our fantasy lives and sometimes are disappointed by reality.

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

I mostly hate organized religion, which I think is a force for the oppression of women and creates warfare.

Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.

Blaming women is always in fashion.

I think feminism means what it has always meant - women want to use all their gifts, all their talents and be judged impartially for them. I don't think feminism has ever meant anything else.

In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.

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.

I think men have always been afraid of women's sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.

We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.

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.

Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.

I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.

perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.

People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.

Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.

Beware of the man who praises women's liberation; he is about to quit his job.

I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.