Erica Jong Quotes

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

Well, I write a lot of poetry - that's where it usually all starts. I definitely want to show you guys sides of me - love, loss, heartbreak - all of that good stuff!

The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Writing a poem is discovering.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

I am a writer - that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Of course, I have to consider that I've written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.

If you're a songwriter, you have to do homework. You can exist for a while on the inspiration, but at some point, you have to sit down and have the discipline to write - to finish the poem, as they say.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.