"Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it."

"There is a rhythm to the ending..."

"Loving someone is a loss of freedom -- but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else."

"Without sex it would be so easy to choose appropriate people to live with. Sex was the joker in an otherwise rational deck."

"Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it."

"Love is love, but marriage is an investment."

"...jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter."

"They all cheat sooner or later. You might as well have one who isn't a bore the rest of the time."

"It takes a spasm of love to write a poem."

"Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends."

"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't..."

"And what if I don't want forgiveness?"

"The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach."

"Keeping a journal implies hope."

"My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust."

"Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile."

"How could one create life with someone who represented death?"

"Humor is a survival tool."

"All people believe their suffering is greater than others."

"Having a baby with him meant marrying that face forever."

"I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world..."

"Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree."

"Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world."

"It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present."

"Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style."

"I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly."

"Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments."

"The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job."

"I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you."

"Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel."

"I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion."

"Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life."

"The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one."

"Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound."

"Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love..."

"My advice to a young writer: Never give up. Read everything you can read — particularly the writers who move you deeply. Study how they do what they do. Read and read and read ... and write and write and write."

"I have had the experience of having my sister get up at a meeting at Columbia University, where these scholars from all over the world were anointing Fear of Flying as a classic. And my sister got up and said, "Erica Jong has ruined my life — with her books.""

"I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains."

"(Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?) Money. White authors often write about money (or don’t) in a way that disregards the realities of most people. It’s as if they assume that everyone simply has it. Or at least their readers. I remember reading “Fear of Flying,” by Erica Jong, many years ago, for instance, and getting very angry when the protagonist went to Europe for months with no concern for money or a job. I assumed she was relying on family money, but it was never explained. It took me out of the text because I couldn’t get over it. Maybe it’s because I grew up working class and money was a factor in everything we did. Marginalized people could never in their wildest dreams make these kinds of choices."

"... Jong presented millions of women readers with the possibility of — the great joys of — agency in place of soporific and joyless passivity in life and, of course, sex."

"Erica Jong's Fanny is a marvelous, robust, funny book."

"(Did you every read Fear of Flying?) G.P.: Well, that's another book that I really read part of several times and couldn't really finish. I thought it could have been done a lot faster and shorter…But again, that book was very important to a lot of women. I respect those facts, when people feel like that. I don't think it's just pure popularity; I don't think it's just that they were sold…But those books, those two books [The Women's Room and Fear of Flying], really were very important for lots of women."

"Many contemporary women writers and artists have attempted to work with new images drawn from an explicitly feminist consciousness or from a female sensibility pulled from the experiences of daily life and made explicit in the context of the women's liberation movement. The struggle to do this requires both the break-up of the interior colonization and the actualization of a women-centered reality. Erica Jong described this process in her own work as she came of age as a writer in the 1970s: "I spent my whole bookish life identifying with writers and nearly all the writers who mattered were men. Even though there were women writers and even though I read them and loved them, they did not seem to matter. If they were good, they were good in spite of being women. If they were bad, it was because they were women. I had, in short, internalized all the dominant cultural stereotypes, and the result was that I could scarcely even imagine a woman as an author." Once Jong could name the problem, however, and see herself as a writer, the content of her work changed: "I stopped writing about ruins and nightingales. I was able to make poetry out of the everyday activities of my life: peeling onions, a trip to the gynecologist, a student demonstration, my own midnight terrors and dreams-all things I would have previously dismissed as trivial.""

"Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life."

"It seems to me that having now created an entire literature of female rage, an entire literature of female introspection, women writers are ready to enter the next phase-the phase of empathy. Without forgetting how hard-won our rage was, without forgetting how many puritanical voices would still like to censor our sexuality, I think we must consider ourselves free to explore the whole world of feeling in our writings-and not to be trapped forever in the phase of discovering buried anger...The time has come to let go of that rage; the time has come to realize that curiosity is braver than rage, that exploration is a nobler calling than war."

"No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool."

"My job is not to paralyze myself by anticipating judgment but to do the best I can and let the judgment fall where it may."