Art & Creativity Quote by Erica Jong

Lusty, humorous, unapologetically self-possessed: Erica Jong is naming an aesthetic as if it were a temperament. The key move is her refusal of “calculated.” She’s pushing back against the old suspicion that a woman’s audacity on the page must be a pose, a marketing angle, a provocation engineered for attention. By insisting it’s “the way I think,” she claims authorship not just over sentences but over the internal weather that produces them.

The subtext is a tug-of-war between spontaneity and craft. Every writer knows style is built: revised into place, sharpened, edited. Jong’s “I’ve invented a writing style” admits the labor while still insisting on authenticity. She’s threading a needle: yes, she constructed a voice; no, it isn’t counterfeit. The word “invented” also signals modernity. Style isn’t inherited from a canon; it’s made, like a tool you design when existing tools don’t fit your hand.

Context matters. Jong emerged in a moment when feminist writing was fighting to be both serious and pleasure-driven, politically alert and sensually alive. “Lustily” is a deliberate reclaiming of appetite as intelligence, humor as authority. She’s telling you what to expect: a mind that won’t separate the erotic from the comic, or the intimate from the public. It’s a self-portrait that doubles as a warning label to gatekeepers: if you want a tidier voice, you’re asking her not to think like herself.