Quotes from Erica Jong

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it...

The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

The body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god's messenger.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The earth is God's book but in our blindness, we have obliterated letters so we may say God has abandoned us. It is we who are illiterate.

Beware of the man who wants to protect you; he will protect you from everything but himself

Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion.