James Salter's Quotes

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.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.

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

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.

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.

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

If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

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.

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.

On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.

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