James Salter Quotes
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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.
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People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.
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I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.
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I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.
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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.
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As a writer, you aren't anybody until you become somebody.
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The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.
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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.
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On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.
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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.
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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.
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The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions.
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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.
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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.
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You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales.
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The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four -the years turn dry as leaves.'
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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.
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You have your brains, but it's energy and desire that make you write a book.
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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.
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It's possible of course, especially when you're young, to read a book and take it to your heart. And you don't need to speak to anybody about it - it's so important to you: You have found it.