James Salter
James Salter
James Arnold Horowitz, better known as James Salter, his pen name and later-adopted legal name, was an American novelist and short-story writer. Originally a career officer and pilot in the United States Air Force, he resigned from the military in 1957 following the successful publication of his first novel, The Hunters...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 June 1925
CountryUnited States of America
bewildered crowd describing large school translate university visualize
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.
above certain people word
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.
world this-life this-world
It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.
people want scripts
Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
character pride thinking
In general, American life is more easy-going. And civic pride, national pride in a cultural sense, is great in America. I think what they esteem in America is character and energy, and being different and superior to other peoples. Of course, 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.
want topics certain
I'd say the biggest relationship is the repetition of certain themes. I don't want to say "topics," but certain points of interest.
philosophy real philosophical
I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be. It's wrong to say "everybody," but in literature I see it all the time - preoccupation with it, philosophical preoccupation, in fact. That's a principle element of literature and philosophy, often cited as the main element, the only real element. I say give it up.
writing certain ifs
I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist.
light snow cold
A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold.
intense inequality
Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.
book ideas levels
Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.
weather meals life-is
Life is weather. Life is meals,
girl party long
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.
solitude benefits difficult
Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.