James Salter Quotes

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

I believe I'm a better writer now than I was when I started. I'm grateful that I had good guidance because you don't make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.

I think what I like best is that when people give talks or workshops, it doesn't really matter what level you are as a writer - whether you are a beginner, or you've been around the block a bit; there's something that you can take away from every session.

I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.

Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience. If you do, you'll mostly fall flat on your face, because it's impossible to judge what people want. And you have to read. That's how you learn what is good writing and what is bad. Then the main thing is application. It's hard work.

I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.

A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.

In the best possible scenario, whenever you get notes from people, they're good notes, and they see things that you wouldn't have seen otherwise, and they make you a better writer.

I wanted to get better at writing, so I knew I needed to move to Nashville.

I am not a trained writer.

Read everything you can on writing. Join online forums and critique groups, go to conferences, get feedback, and learn, learn, learn!

By writing much, one learns to write well.

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.

I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.

Writing seems to be more difficult as you move through the years.

Grub Street Writers is the reason I've stayed in Boston. I started teaching for Grub back in 1997, when founder Eve Bridburg, a Boston University M.A. alumna, as I am, kindly gave me my first job out of grad school.

I'm very lucky to be in projects that have such skilled writing in them.

Just because someone has stylistic limitations doesn't necessarily make them a worse writer.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.

Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day: The more you write, the easier it becomes.