Writer Quotes by Erica Jong

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

— Erica Jong

Keeping a journal implies hope.

— Erica Jong

“That's what a writer is -- a conqueror of fears.”

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

Conflict is the soul of literature.

— Erica Jong

Home is where your books are.

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.

— Erica Jong

The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study...

— Erica Jong

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

— Erica Jong

writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.

— Erica Jong

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem…

— Erica Jong

I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and…

— Erica Jong

The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite…

— Erica Jong

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things…

— Erica Jong

Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed…

— Erica Jong

“Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need…

— Erica Jong

Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why…

— Erica Jong

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…

— Erica Jong

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good,…

— Erica Jong

“I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility.…

— Erica Jong

“All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll…

— Erica Jong

it is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not…

— Erica Jong

Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and…

— Erica Jong

But we should ask the question: Why should a writer be more than a writer? Why should a writer be a guru?…

— Erica Jong

I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing…

— Erica Jong

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

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

— Erica Jong

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

— Erica Jong

The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.

— Erica Jong

I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms…

— Erica Jong

It was unimaginable what happens to you when you get known for a book that everybody reads, or that everybody has heard…

— Erica Jong

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one…

— Erica Jong

I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I…

— Erica Jong

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons,…

— Erica Jong

If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts…

— Erica Jong