Erica Jong - Writer Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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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
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
Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.

Erica Jong
A writer is someone who takes the universal whore of language and turns her into a virgin again.

Erica Jong
An artist or writer is a specimen human being who just goes about the world hoping to be a bundle of nerve endings that take in everything and transform it into a voice.

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

Erica Jong
It is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.

Erica Jong
The job of the writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories.

Erica Jong
Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.

Erica Jong
Writers tend to be addicted to houses... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.

Erica Jong