I smiled to myself as I read an interview with James Salter; I identified with him on his style of writing – how he is a "frotteur", someone who "rubs words in his hand" so he can find the best phrase – on how his writing is constantly sexual, and how he was a film writer and director before he became a novelist.

Excerpts from the interview:

Are you comfortable with your identity as a "writer's writer."

[Gives a dry chuckle.] Writers are the best readers. That's what that "writer's writer" means to me.

One of the features of a writer's writer is that he is brilliant sentence by sentence.

Sentences should not cause you to stop and admire them. They should be in the service of the page.

Ah. "You have to kill your darlings."

I think that was what I was trying to say — if the sentence is standing up to be admired.

Have you ever abandoned a novel?

Yes. I wrote a novel maybe five years ago. It was insufferable. Distance always helps. Somebody said, Mayakovski maybe, "After you write a poem, put it in a drawer for a least a week."

A good writer I know brags that he writes slowly sentence by sentence and never revises. The samurai method.

William Styron says the same thing. He never goes to another page until that page is satisfactory. I don't think that works for me. If the page is not satisfactory, I just go on and come back later.

Here is a personal question. Your writing is constantly sexual, often directly autobiographical in your nonfiction or else sideways autobiographical in your fiction. And you've said that your wife is your first reader. It must be very difficult writing about the women you knew before you met her. Doesn't that inhibit you –"What will Kay think when she reads this?"

There is a danger in that, of course. There may be some jealousy and things unexpressed, but these things still rankle her. In general, I think we can assume women do not like to hear about other previous women. I don't know what to say. If it is clearly not fiction, think it over before you write it.

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