James Salter Quotes

I'm a big reader. And I take a lot of pictures, do a lot of writing.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

Things written, remain.

I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that's what we do. That's what storytellers do.

If I don't create, I don't exist.

When I was younger, I would write a ton, mostly because my mom told me I had incredible creativity and a gift of using words, only these were words that didn't get me in trouble.

I could never really decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, and for a while, I thought that maybe I wanted to be a writer... I've always loved to write, that form of expression.

I've always subscribed to an old Chinese proverb that the palest ink is better than the best memory.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

You can make anything by writing.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.

Write. Write every day. Write honestly. Write something that doesn’t exist, and you wish did. Read. Learn. Study. Watch people. Listen to what they say, listen to how they say it and listen to what they do not say. Surprise yourself. Scare yourself.

Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed.

Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.

There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.