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
brother interesting parent
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.
realization lasts
ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
children believe successful
Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.
dream reality skeletons
The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
intense impatient
Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
pages ifs
Life passes into pages if it passes into anything,
writing ideas people
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.
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.
weather meals life-is
Life is weather. Life is meals,
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.
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.
world this-life this-world
It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.
beauty
There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.
time
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.