Quotes By Erica Jong

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

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

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

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

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

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

Sadly, because of the enormous gap between rich and poor, some mothers can afford helpers, but many can't. Those who can would be kinder to refrain from criticizing other women.

Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

At certain historic moments, grandparents took on childrearing responsibilities. In many cultures, they still do. Chinese grandparents who are able to retire at 55 are seen all over Beijing bouncing grandbabies. In the United States, we can't afford to retire at 55.

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

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.

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.

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.

I've never been able to control my public image.

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

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

Men and women, women and men. It will never work.

He who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it.

Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I remember everything but forgive anyway.