James Salter

“There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.”

“My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something...”

“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...”

“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.”

“I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he ha...”