Erica Jong Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

  Erica Jong

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  erica jong “fear of flying”

• If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Listening, Important

• 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.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Years, Finishing

• Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

  Erica Jong

  Home, Writing, Reality

• Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.

  Erica Jong

  Block, Writing, Inspire

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

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Heart, Exercise

• I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Glowing, Dust

  Erica Jong (1999). “What Do Women Want?: Bread, Roses, Sex, Power”, Perennial

• When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  Charlotte Templin, Erica Jong (2002). “Conversations with Erica Jong”, p.130, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Voice, Giving

• I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Diaries, Boring

• I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

  Erica Jong

  Hurt, Writing, Rooms

• 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

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Knowing, Beginners

• I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Thinking, Who I Am

• I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

  Erica Jong

  Moving, Teaching, Writing

• When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Silence, Despair

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

  Erica Jong

  Writing

  Erica Jong (1995). “How to Save Your Own Life”, N A L Trade

• Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.

  Erica Jong

  Sex, Writing, Turns

  FaceBook post by Erica Jong from Mar 14, 2013

• One writes not by will but by surrender.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Surrender

  Erica Jong (1999). “What Do Women Want?: Bread, Roses, Sex, Power”, Perennial

• I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

• Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

  Erica Jong

  Art, Book, Writing

• It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Thinking, Parting

  Erica Jong (2013). “Fear of Flying: 40th Anniversary Edition”, p.289, Open Road Media

• It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Males, Fiction

• The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

  Erica Jong

  Distance, Book, Writing

  FaceBook post by Erica Jong from Sep 18, 2012

• Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Mind, Levels

  Charlotte Templin, Erica Jong (2002). “Conversations with Erica Jong”, p.11, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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.

  Erica Jong

  Prayer, War, Hate

  "Into the Lion's Den". www.theguardian.com. October 26, 2000.

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