James Salter Quotes

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

An author departs, he does not die.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our work.

You can't possibly predict what will last or not. But once you attempt to write for the ages, you're doomed.

It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.

I believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.

Every writer secretly hopes that what he or she has written will endure.

What’s written remains, though a writer is buried beneath the ground.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

I'm really into the 'classic' thing - the craft of writing something that will last, that won't die by next year.

My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.

Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said - On wings they are carried - After the singer is dead And the maker buried.

The written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect.

Making movies is an effort is an attempt to leave a trace of your existence.

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds

Lives there the man with soul so dead as to disown the wish to merit the people's applause, and having uttered words worthy to be kept in cedar oil to latest times, to leave behind him rhymes that dread neither herrings nor frankincense.

A small drop of ink makes thousands, perhaps millions... think.

The spoken word is nothing. It hardly lives longer than an insect! Only the written word is eternal. - Balbulus