James Salter Quotes

Every nation feels itself to be superior, but in America it’s a jaunty feeling, and in some cases a rather ominous one among the super-patriots.

There are writers for whom names mean nothing; everybody could be called John and Elizabeth, and the writing would be just as good. A name, of course, is like a piece of clothing, isn’t it? It gives you an impression right away.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.

It was not until I began to write a book called ‘Light Years’ that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.

I spent the night on a sliver of rock high up on the east face of Long’s Peak, climbing with Tom Frost, and slept at the icy feet of the Dru, listening to the lightning crack above me and the thunder roll down. I only did it to write about it. I would never go up on the Grotto Wall for fun.

Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

I’m a ‘frotteur,’ someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader‘s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing.

I wasted time writing films. I don’t look back on those years as lost, but it wasn’t what I should have been doing.

The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

As a writer, you aren’t anybody until you become somebody.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It’s the words that break your heart.

Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.

A film writer is very much like a party girl. While you’re good-looking and still unlined, the possibilities seem endless. But your appeal doesn’t last long and you’re quickly discarded.

I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had.

There came a time when I felt I was not going to be satisfied with life unless I could write.

‘The Paris Review‘ was always the pinnacle: it was the place to be published. You were thrilled if you were published in ‘The Paris Review,’ and George Plimpton himself was practically mythical. He was a legendary figure.

Your parents are the parents you know best. Your brother and sister, if you have them, are the brother and sister you know best. They may not be the ones you like the best. They may not be the most interesting, but they are the closest and probably the clearest to you.

I’ve known the anxiety of being completely lost, flying at night. It can be extreme. You’re travelling at close to five hundred miles an hour, and every minute that goes by takes you further into being lost unless you get help from ground radar somewhere or somehow figure out the error.

My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy on every page. I suppose I am trying to write such a book.

Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous, never lose their power.

The deepest instinct is to want to do something enduring, something worthwhile, and to be engaged by that, whether one achieves it or not.

West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest – more than necessary, in my view.

Like books you will never have the chance to read, there are languages you do not know, and you’re not going to get a chance to learn, so you’ll never really know what was written, only the approximation.

You can’t be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales.

I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers – not all of them, of course.

I have said many times I don’t want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That’s not who I am. I devoted the subsequent 50 years – more – to writing.

I don’t hold myself dictated to by what everyone is saying, by the tabloids or popular opinion. I don’t like bourgeois values. I say you find your own way to live.

My first book was published without any editorial advice. Nobody said, ‘You might do this or that,’ or ‘Why don’t we see more of this.’ I merely took the book and published it.

The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as ‘fiction’ and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called ‘nonfiction‘ strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.

I think you can be taught to write. You can’t be taught to be a good writer. For that, you have to bring something to it, yourself, something that can’t be given to you.

Although I’ve made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.

There is no situation like the open road, and seeing things completely afresh. I’m used to traveling. It’s not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It’s the curtain coming up on another act.

A name, of course is like a piece of clothing, isn’t it? It gives you an impression right away.

I’ve always said that I felt women are more heroic.

Certain people can keep a word tune, so to speak, and certain people cannot. And, above all, certain people can tell a story, and other people can’t. They don’t hear that point where something else has to come.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

The writing workshops and programs that are everywhere have encouraged writing. And if that produces more writing, it’s also producing more readers of an elevated level. So all in all, a good thing.

You have your brains, but it’s energy and desire that make you write a book.

If you read a book about school – someone else’s book – you always translate it into your own school experiences. It’s describing the student: he’s bewildered and lost in a large crowd in a university classroom. You’ll visualize that from your own experiences. So, everything you know is what you’re really writing.

The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It’s a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.