Quotes from Erica Jong

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture…Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.

But the fact is, she [the muse] won't be summoned. She alights when it damn well pleases her. She falls in love with one artist, then deserts him for another. She's a real bitch!

Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst. And speak the truth -- but without malice. Loving candour is the secret of friendship.

What all the ads and whorescopes seemed to imply was that if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.

I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

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

Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.

Tears are a form of communication - like speech - and require a listener.

I remember everything but forgive anyway.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.

But the great compensation for being fifty in a culture that is not kind to older women is that you care less about criticism and you are less afraid of confrontation. In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.

And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, 'the absentminded professor-' They screamed at me, but I couldn't hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe.

There's nothing good about being ordinary. People don't respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don't run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity.

Rendall's first law of jealousy: jealousy does the cock harder and pussy wetter.

We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer - and the trouble is: you believe it.

In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons.