Erica Jong Quotes

I tend to write about my anxieties - it's what I'm afraid will happen. And I write a story working it out.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

My daughter was two weeks old when I wrote 'White Wine in the Sun.' I can remember just sobbing and having to leave the room.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.

A lot of banging in the head has built up over the decades, and for my own sanity, I needed to write. I wanted to see if I could tell an honest, organic story about characters that interest me.

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.

I started writing to save my life.

I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.

It can be really powerful to write something when you're sad.

I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that. I didn't know what else to do about it except write about it.

I don't exorcise anything with my writing. I'm sure people do, but I don't.

I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away.

I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.

I won't say that writing is therapy, but for me, the act of writing is therapy. The ability to be productive is good for my mental health. It's always better for me to be writing than vegetating on some couch.

I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It's a form of self-help.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

I feel a lot healthier when I'm having sex. Physically. I feel all these jitters when I wake up in the morning. Just energy jitters. I take vitamins, I work out every day. When I'm having sex, I don't have that.

I absolutely love writing about the things that scare me, the things that keep me up at night. I don't quite know why. Perhaps because so many things do scare me, and this is my subconscious way of trying to exercise some control over things that go bump in the night!

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.

It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

First novels tend to be blood-lettings, and they're focused on you, not the reader.

I guess I usually write when I'm in a really intense headspace, because it's my form of self-therapy.