652 Quotes by Erica Jong

You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.

Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I’m doing something right.

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.

The truth is we all want to be known. And we’re simultaneously afraid of it. We want to be unmasked, and the person who can unmask us wins our respect.

When women have so absorbed the disease of sexism that they themselves can inflict it on each other, we clearly have a perfect, self-replenishing machine for the continuation of sexism. Unable to turn our assertiveness against men, we turn it against each other. Thus we remain stuck in the troubles we always had. It is imperative we renovate the machine – no, not renovate it, but smash it entirely, so that we allow women to be all they need to be.

I’ve become more conservative about sex as I’ve gotten older.

Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it’s braver to die old.

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

Plot is just a fancy way of saying ’and then.