A Quote by James Salter

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.

James Salter

Quote Topics

Always Certain Exile His Keep Life Move Natural Outsider Part Reporting Sense Things Travel Writer

Quote Author

James Salter
American - Novelist
June 10, 1925 - June 19, 2015

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

Larry McMurtry

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Roberto Bolano

Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

Pema Chodron

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

Ma Jian

I allegedly am an outsider writer, so I write from the perspective of somebody who doesn't completely fit in. But at the same time, I can state the fact that I don't know of any good writer who is not an outsider writer.

Rabih Alameddine

If you don't belong somewhere, that outsider status you have gives you perspective. Of course, another word for outsider is 'exile,' and that's not fun at all.

Peter Morgan

I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people.

Sara Quin

What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.

Aleksandar Hemon

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Wallace Stegner

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

Monica Ali

In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.

Flannery O'Connor

The Outsider isn't [Albert] Camus, but in The Outsider there are parts of Camus. There's this impression of exile.

Catherine Camus

There will always be a sense of things you want to achieve, where you want to be, a sense of disappointment, a few regrets here and there. Those are always going to linger. How you cope with them and how you move on is what your life is about.

Arbaaz Khan

I tend to write about people. I look at things from the bottom up and from the perspective of outsiders. A part of me just identifies with them. It's my messed up internal nature that I always feel like an outsider. It's just my nature. At film festivals, I was an outsider for sure, but I always felt like one as well. I have that feeling at parties, too. I don't belong there.