Explore Quotes by James Salter

Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous, never lose their power.

The deepest instinct is to want to do something enduring, something worthwhile, and to be engaged by that, whether one achieves it or not.

I've made an effort to nurture the feminine in myself. I don't mean overtly, but in terms of response to things.

I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had.

The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions.

I don't hold myself dictated to by what everyone is saying, by the tabloids or popular opinion. I don't like bourgeois values. I say you find your own way to live.

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

Like books you will never have the chance to read, there are languages you do not know, and you're not going to get a chance to learn, so you'll never really know what was written, only the approximation.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

I've always said that I felt women are more heroic.

West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what I'm hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.

I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.

You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales.

There are writers for whom names mean nothing; everybody could be called John and Elizabeth, and the writing would be just as good. A name, of course, is like a piece of clothing, isn't it? It gives you an impression right away.

I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.

You have your brains, but it's energy and desire that make you write a book.

As a writer, you aren't anybody until you become somebody.