“A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture. . .”

There is a feeling Faulkner probably had—I have had it myself—that somewhere the true life is being lived, though not where you are. He may have heard the sound of it in Greenville, the rich, destructive roar not of places such as he had known but of ones far more potent. Something in him responded to that, the same thing most likely that had made him pose as an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, invent combat missions, crashes, a silver plate in his head. He was a small man. He could sit in a chair and his feet sometimes might not touch the floor. His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he even knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.

One thing about Faulkner I like, apart from the simplicity, on the whole, of his life, was he wrote on the bedroom walls. That seems to me the true mark of a writer. It is like a pianist practicing in the middle of the night when the whole household is asleep or trying to sleep—the music is greater than any of their lives.

—From Burning the Days, a 1997 memoir by James Salter. h/t to Howard Means, who highly recommends Salter’s memoir.