Quotes from Erica Jong

November and the sun grows sparse in the sky.

want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

You must be very specific in your wishes or they'll come back to haunt you.

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.

It's impossible to generalize about sexuality - even one's own. The only way to keep it pure is to keep it unspoken. Keep it out of words. Words are not where sexuality lives. Without privacy, there is no ecstasy.

The Church is seen as a secular organization - a real-estate conglomerate, a powerful lobby for the oppression of women - which has little or nothing to do with spiritual transcendence. It will doubtless seek to ban this book. Less than two hundred and fifty years ago, it would have burned the author.

It is less important whether we worship the holy spirit in the form of a tree, a woman, a man, or an animal than that we do worship and honor it. At the same time, we must accord each other the right to atheism or agnosticism - for religion becomes little more than fascism if it is compelled rather than self-motivated.

I went for years not finishing anything because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.

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.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.

You know, when you get old, you see that everything is a joke. All the things you were passionate about don't mean a thing. You only did them to keep busy.

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