Erica Jong, an American author renowned for her novel “Fear of Flying” (1973), delved deeply into explicit expressions of women’s sexuality and narratives of contemporary and historical women.
Born in 1942 in New York to a Jewish family, she initially disconnected from her Jewish roots, rediscovering them in the 1980s.
Jong’s parents were involved in the arts and her upbringing fostered a love for writing.
Attending Barnard College and Columbia, she pursued literature and had a turbulent personal life.
Early influenced by poets like Sylvia Plath, she began with poetry before transitioning to novels. “Fear of Flying,” semi-autobiographical, gained massive popularity, with over ten million copies sold.
Though sometimes dismissed as merely sensational, Jong’s works tackled feminist themes, confronting societal expectations and sexual dynamics.
Her later novels explored historical and literary themes and she consistently intertwined personal experiences in her narratives, making her works richly layered.
I have listed the top quotes by Erica Jong in this blog post.
Best Erica Jong Quotes
A wet dream in the mind of New York. ~ Erica Jong.
Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I’m doing something right. ~ Erica Jong.
This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away. ~ Erica Jong.
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. ~ Erica Jong.
Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough. ~ Erica Jong.
The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning. ~ Erica Jong.
Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm. ~ Erica Jong.
Blaming women is always in fashion. ~ Erica Jong.
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God. ~ Erica Jong.
If you don’t risk anything, you risk more. ~ Erica Jong.
Home is where your books are. ~ Erica Jong.
It takes courage to lead a life. Any life. ~ Erica Jong.
Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are. ~ Erica Jong.
Men and women, women and men. It will never work. ~ Erica Jong.
Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world. ~ Erica Jong.
As long as I’m facing the right direction, it doesn’t matter the size of my steps. ~ Erica Jong.
Famous Erica Jong Quotes
If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more. ~ Erica Jong.
I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book. ~ Erica Jong.
You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare. ~ Erica Jong.
They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck. ~ Erica Jong.
Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big. ~ Erica Jong.
There is a rhythm to the ending… ~ 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.
Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable. ~ Erica Jong.
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. ~ Erica Jong.
Conflict is the soul of literature. ~ Erica Jong.
Top Erica Jong Quotes
I don’t think that I had any idea that ‘Fear of Flying’ would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on. ~ Erica Jong.
When everyone thinks they know you, it’s hard not to be guarded. ~ Erica Jong.
What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave. ~ Erica Jong.
The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. ~ Erica Jong.
Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery. ~ Erica Jong.
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. ~ Erica Jong.
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own. ~ Erica Jong.
My grandchildren are fabulous and funny. ~ Erica Jong.
Anger is really disappointed hope. ~ Erica Jong.
Popular Erica Jong Quotes
The most important education you get is your own – the one you learn in solitude. ~ 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.
You don’t get to choose what you get famous for and you don’t get to control which of your life’s many struggles gets to stand for you. ~ Erica Jong.
It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. ~ Erica Jong.
The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did. ~ Erica Jong.
The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy. ~ Erica Jong.
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more. ~ Erica Jong.
Sex doesn’t disappear, it just changes forms. ~ Erica Jong.
Never follow a dog act. You know you’re on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life. ~ Erica Jong.
We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion. ~ Erica Jong.
Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations. ~ Erica Jong.
If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most. ~ Erica Jong.
Great Erica Jong Quotes
I remember everything but forgive anyway. ~ Erica Jong.
We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate. ~ Erica Jong.
Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household. ~ Erica Jong.
Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities. ~ Erica Jong.
Betrayal betrays the betrayer. ~ Erica Jong.
There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes. ~ Erica Jong.
Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society. ~ Erica Jong.
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could. ~ Erica Jong.
Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses. ~ Erica Jong.
And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more. ~ Erica Jong.
What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago. ~ Erica Jong.
You can’t be creative and still be a good girl. ~ Erica Jong.
I have lived my life according to this principle: If I’m afraid of it, then I must do it. ~ Erica Jong.
Erica Jong Quotes on Love
Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. ~ Erica Jong.
There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage. ~ Erica Jong.
My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings. ~ Erica Jong.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. ~ Erica Jong.
I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation. ~ Erica Jong.
A baby’s a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you’re pregnant, or you’d probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother-how reading goes out the window and thinking too. ~ Erica Jong.
I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound. ~ Erica Jong.
Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all. ~ Erica Jong.
The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy. ~ Erica Jong.
If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair. ~ Erica Jong.
At fifty the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won’t be imprisoned anymore. ~ Erica Jong.
Art is always an energy exchange. ~ Erica Jong.
Beautiful Erica Jong Quotes
The soul is awakened through service. ~ Erica Jong.
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had. ~ Erica Jong.
People are terrified. A lot of them are in relationships that aren’t satisfying, and if you tell them they can change their life, they get really scared. ~ Erica Jong.
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. ~ Erica Jong.
Surviving means being born over and over. ~ Erica Jong.
Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. ~ Erica Jong.
I don’t think you will ever fully understand how you’ve touched my life and made me who I am. I don’t think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star. ~ Erica Jong.
A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart. ~ Erica Jong.
Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar. ~ Erica Jong.
If there’s anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it’s uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman’s best career move. ~ Erica Jong.
Beware of the man who praises women’s liberation; he is about to quit his job. ~ 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.
So these were the 90 top Erica Jong quotes and sayings.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Elizabeth Barrett Browning quotes and Ellen DeGeneres quotes
