Zitat des Tages von 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.
I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.
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.
In 1957, I decided: write or perish.
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.
On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.
I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
The deepest instinct is to want to do something enduring, something worthwhile, and to be engaged by that, whether one achieves it or not.
I spent the night on a sliver of rock high up on the east face of Long's Peak, climbing with Tom Frost, and slept at the icy feet of the Dru, listening to the lightning crack above me and the thunder roll down. I only did it to write about it. I would never go up on the Grotto Wall for fun.
The death of kings can be recited, but not of one's child.
I've always said that I felt women are more heroic.
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.
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 sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.
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.
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.
I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
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.
You have your brains, but it's energy and desire that make you write a book.
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.
Most writers can write three times as many books as I have and still live a life.
'The Paris Review' was always the pinnacle: it was the place to be published. You were thrilled if you were published in 'The Paris Review,' and George Plimpton himself was practically mythical. He was a legendary figure.
You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales.
There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.
Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous, never lose their power.
I think you can be taught to write. You can't be taught to be a good writer. For that, you have to bring something to it, yourself, something that can't be given to you.
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.