Erica Jong Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I'm always at home - yea, I'm always at Om.
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I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.
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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
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Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
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It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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There was this song I was working on called 'Swing.' It was almost finished, but there was something missing, and I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. And then this little piece of information - this little tweet - came to the forefront of my mind.
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Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.
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There is something about my aura or essence, or whatever, that draws the ex-wife characters to me. I don't seek them out, but people tend to think of me for that particular archetype, or whatever you want to call it, and I don't mind it. I think there is a strength to it.
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People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'
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The Bushes were certainly part of Texas in their mind, but they didn't have the kind of political flavor that you normally find in Texas politicians. It's just Texas is such a unique place to itself that politically, at least so far, they haven't found anybody to play nationally.
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I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.
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Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.
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It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
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I wouldn't mind at all coming back to earth after my death.
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I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.
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I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent, and I'm not your mommy; I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.
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I don't necessarily prefer playing villains. I know a lot of people say they are more fun, but if the scriptwriter has done their work well, you can find something realistic in a villain and find the mistakes in a hero - it's all down to the writing.
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The mind understands something only insofar as it absorbs it like a seed into itself, nurtures it, and lets it grow into blossom and fruit. Therefore scatter holy seeds into the soil of the spirit.
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The temple is a place of worship. Reverence is a supernal form of worship. It is the form of worship found in the celestial kingdom.
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The American idea that everyone graduates high school at 18 is a good one.
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I can always tell when a filmmaker doesn't care about his or her characters; they just care about setting them up to kill them off.
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There is just one life for each of us: our own.
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Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.
