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.

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.

The death of kings can be recited, but not of one's child.

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.

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.

There came a time when I felt I was not going to be satisfied with life unless I could write.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

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

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.