Erica Jong

The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.

Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.

Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god__ messenger.

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.

You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

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

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

Solitude is un-American.

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.