James Salter
It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.Collection: Beauty
There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.Collection: Beauty
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.
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.
The deepest instinct is to want to do something enduring, something worthwhile, and to be engaged by that, whether one achieves it or not.
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.
Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.
The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.
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.
On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.
I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
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.
West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view.
I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.
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.
I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
I've always said that I felt women are more heroic.
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.
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.
A name, of course is like a piece of clothing, isn't it? It gives you an impression right away.
If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.
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.
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.
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.
I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what I'm hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.
In 1957, I decided: write or perish.
There came a time when I felt I was not going to be satisfied with life unless I could write.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.
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 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.
You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales.
The death of kings can be recited, but not of one's child.
I would say that I am a jaded man beyond most expectations, but, like everyone else, I still have hope.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions.
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.
As a writer, you aren't anybody until you become somebody.
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.
Most writers can write three times as many books as I have and still live a life.