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
normal economic economic-systems
The normal economic system works itself.
claims entitled
You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
feelings aristocracy
I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
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.
spills our-lives moderates
We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives...
dream struggle hands
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams...
accidents
It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.
oxygen vacuums steel
You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.
realization lasts
ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
dream reality skeletons
The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
weather meals life-is
Life is weather. Life is meals,
fortunate invented left man naked
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.
coming curtain faces hearing life looking meeting open question seeing situation
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.
tend
West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view.