Erica Jong

Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.

I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

Charlie had that defensive contempt for homosexuals which people often have when their own sexuality is an embarrassment to them.

I knew I was in England by the smell.

It was not clear how it would end. In nineteenth- century novels, they get married. In twentieth-century novels, they get divorced. Can you have an ending in which they do neither?

As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

Men and women, women and men—it will never work.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am 46 and have been for some years past.

Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

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

Pleasure for one hour, a bottle of wine. Pleasure for one year a marriage; but pleasure for a lifetime, a garden.

Beware of the man who denounces women writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.

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

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.

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

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

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is.