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

• As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Past, Thinking

• the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, People, Lasts

  Erica Jong (1994). “The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller”, p.52, Grove Press

• But we should ask the question: Why should a writer be more than a writer? Why should a writer be a guru? Why are we supposed to be psychiatrists? Isn't it enough to write and tell the truth? It's not like telling the truth is common. Writers are the earthworms of society. We aerate the soil. That's enough.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Soil, Common

• Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Each Day, Fragmented

• I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

  Erica Jong

  Book, Writing, Hands

• All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

  Erica Jong

  Book, Fall, Reading

  Erica Jong (2006). “Fear of Fifty”, p.235, Penguin

• we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Our Lives, Ifs

  Erica Jong (2007). “What Do Women Want?: Essays by Erica Jong”, p.155, Penguin

• Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.

  Erica Jong

  Honesty, Nice, Writing

• Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Thinking, Expression

  FaceBook post by Erica Jong from Mar 01, 2016

• Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Cynical, Truth Is

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

• [Henry Miller] was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation - and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.

  Erica Jong

  Real, Writing, People

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