Erica Jong

(26 March 1942 / New York City)

poet Erica Jong
#168 on top 500 poets

Erica Jong Quotes

  • ''Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "Hello to Hollywood ...," epigraph, How To Save Your Own Life (1977).
    12 person liked.
    		9 person did not like.
  • ''Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. How To Save Your Own Life, epigraph to "Bennett tells all in Woodstock ... ," (1977).
    15 person liked.
    		6 person did not like.
  • ''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 (b. 1942), U.S. author. How To Save Your Own Life, epigraph to "My posthumous life ...," (1977).
    14 person liked.
    		6 person did not like.
  • ''Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "Take the Red-Eye....," Epigraph, How To Save Your Own Life (1977).
    6 person liked.
    		1 person did not like.
  • ''Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "The Artist as Housewife," The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Kragbrun (1972).
    10 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "The Artist as Housewife," The First Ms Reader, ed. Francine Kragbrun (1972).
    2 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "The Artist as Housewife," The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Kragbrun (1972).
    3 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''Men and women, women and men. It will never work.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. The narrator (Isadora Wing), in Fear of Flying, ch. 16 (1973).
    8 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. The narrator (Isadora Wing), in Fear of Flying, ch. 6 (1973).
    3 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. The narrator (Isadora Wing), in Fear of Flying, ch. 6 (1973).
    3 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.

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Best Poem of Erica Jong

Sunday Afternoons

I sit at home
at my desk alone
as I used to do
on many sunday afternoons
when you came back to me,
your arms ached for me,
and your arms would close me in
though they smelled of other women.

I think of you
on Sunday afternoons.

Your sweet head would bow,
like a child somehow,
down to me -
and your hair and your eyes were wild.

We would embrace on the floor-
You see my back´s still sore.
You knew how easily I bruised,
It´s a soreness I would never lose.

I think of you
on Sunday afternoons.

Read the full of Sunday Afternoons

The Artist As An Old Man

If you ask him he will talk for hours--
how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers
raw with cold, and later painted bowers
in ladies' boudoirs; how he played checkers
for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;
how he fled the border to a country
which disappeared wars ago; unfriended
crossed a continent while this century
began. He seldom speaks of painting now.

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