James Salter Quotes

It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

I'm not saying it never occurred to me to want to write a masterpiece, but I really doubt I could.

I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.

Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.

For me, working on original material is very important.

To write anything decent, it's hard. Anything you want to be good is hard.

For me, storytelling is what I love to do and that's my life's work. Football is not my life's work. It's just part of my life's journey, but creativity is my actual life's work.

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.

I enjoy the songs that I write, but I can never enjoy them the same way as other peoples' songs.

If four or five days go by, and I haven't written anything, I feel incomplete.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

When I read 'Another Country' when I was in my early 20s, you know, as soon as I put the book down, my first thought was, 'I will never be able to write a book like this.' And my second thought was, 'I really want to try writing a book like this for the 21st century.'

I love my painting - it fills me with passion. But it's not something I expect anyone else to love.

All writers have a love-hate relationship with writing. Performing is fun, too, but I wouldn't say it's my favorite. But the most fulfilling is producing.

For a writer, working in television is an incredibly rewarding medium. You're in charge of all aspects of production and get to see your vision come to life every week.

If you're going to clutter up the world with more novels, you should do a little more than entertain people.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it...I have written because it fulfilled me. ... I did it for the pure joy of the things. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.

Naturally, people's image is of a performer, but the reality of it is the writing for me has always been the most important thing and the most rewarding thing.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I'm attracted to good writing. When I read the page and I know what we're after and where we're headed, and I'm fortunate enough to respect that idea and am able to pitch myself toward that, that feels like the culmination of everything that I've spent my life trying to do, since I played that tree in that play in third grade.

From when I was a kid I wanted to write. It was so important to me that I was writing my own material.