When I was a young boy I wanted to play for Newcastle United, I wanted to wear the number nine shirt and I wanted to score goals at St James' Park. I've lived my dream and I realise how lucky I've been to have done that.
As a kid, I was listening to Aretha Franklin, Etta James and hip-hop as well as music my parents were listening to, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.
Sometimes you wanna be James Bond, and sometimes you wanna be Marlon Brando until you realize you can't be either!
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
Russell James asked me to shoot underwater. He tied my feet under the water. I don't know how many feet - maybe five, six meters. He tied me underwater and I had no air. Somebody had a tube, and they were giving me some oxygen, but I couldn't really see anything. Everything was blurry. I'm waiting for the oxygen - that was the craziest thing.
Before Jason Bourne, before Jack Ryan, there was Bond, James Bond, the original two-dimensional, world-saving secret agent.
I want to be the LeBron James of baseball.
Growing up, I listened to a lot of jazz and blues records - John Coltrane and Etta James. I was also really into Radiohead and the BeeGees.
I'm more user-experience and technology-minded. James is good at knowing what the user is going to buy, and the creative world he's buying them into.
Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.
