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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.
James Salter -
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.
James Salter
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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.
James Salter -
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.
James Salter -
The death of kings can be recited, but not of one's child.
James Salter -
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.
James Salter -
Most writers can write three times as many books as I have and still live a life.
James Salter -
The deepest instinct is to want to do something enduring, something worthwhile, and to be engaged by that, whether one achieves it or not.
James Salter
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I would say that I am a jaded man beyond most expectations, but, like everyone else, I still have hope.
James Salter -
I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
James Salter -
I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it's disheartening; you don't want to go on. That's what I think is hard - the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done.
James Salter -
I've made an effort to nurture the feminine in myself. I don't mean overtly, but in terms of response to things.
James Salter -
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.
James Salter -
Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous, never lose their power.
James Salter