Books Quote by James Salter

It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American…

— Michael Korda

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life…

— Pat Conroy

Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland,…

— J. M. Coetzee

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a…

— Edward Albee

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it…

— Gwendolyn Brooks

I knew that, when writing a book, you're not constrained by a budget. You're not constrained by what you can do, in terms of…

— George R. R. Martin

My colleagues knew I was writing poems. I never hid it from them. I don't think they ever thought I was cheating on them.…

— Ted Kooser

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet…

— Robert Frost

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting…

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

“It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was…

— Ernest Hemingway

I wish to God I knew as much about writing as I did when I was 19. I was absolutely certain about most things…

— John Steinbeck

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would…

— Ben Dolnick