Quote: 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]
Quote: Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same. [Erica Jong]
Quote: There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship --only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Men and women, women and men; it will never work. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Jealousy is all the fun you think they had... [Erica Jong]
Quote: Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends. [Erica Jong]
Quote: To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives. [Erica Jong]
Quote: I can live without it all -- love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. [Erica Jong]
Quote: 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. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Solitude is un-American. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one is to blame. [Erica Jong]
Quote: There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness -- her selfishness, in short -- is a reproach to the American way of life. [Erica Jong]
Quote: Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms! [Erica Jong]