JAMESSalterwritesAmerican sentencesbetterthananybody writing today," holds Richard Ford in his new introduction to Salter's novel Light Years. Although he bears a giantliteraryreputationintheUS - particularlyamongothernovelists, although Salter has said he is sick of being described as "a writers' writer" - he is only now being fully appraised in the UK with the republication of Light Years, and his debut The Hunters, as Penguin Modern Classics, a series which rarely honours writers who are still alive. Meeting him at the Savoy Hotel, London, it is impossible not to notice how charming, too, are many of his spoken sentences. One wants to listen to him talk all day long, and ask questions which will incite not one of his unassuming shrugsbutinsteadoneofhismany eloquent speeches.

Born in 1925, Salter grew up in New York, the son of second-generation immigrant Jews. He says that he feels "98% American and 2% the rest of it". As a schoolboy he wrote, inspired by good English teachers, butmostofall,heread. "Thewayyou become a writer is by reading. What stimulated me as a young boy was that I loved to read,ohGod,IlovedtoreadIlike Nabokov, Borges. I am absolutely ravished by Isaac Babel, WG Sebald, I think Marquez is a great writer."

His experiences of the Korean war, dogfighting in Saber jets for the US Air Force, inspired that first novel, The Hunters, in which the protagonist, Captain Connell, is forced to question himself in the midst of death and destruction. Salter went on to write innumerable film scripts, including DownhillRacer,whichbecameoneof Robert Redford's pet projects.

When he gave up the military to write full time he found it "extremely difficult, crushingly difficult". "I couldn't believe in it, that was the problem. I didn't believe this would ever amount to anything.

"I had been doing something else for so long, I kept feeling, what am I doing sitting here,youshouldbedoingsomethingelse...Terriblydifficult."

After a gap of 10 years he produced the intense,eroticASportAndAPastime, which remains the only novel he has written that meets Salter's own high standards.Butheminedthethemeofdesireeven further in Light Years, the book that others consider his masterpiece,whichexploitedthecracks beneaththeglitteringsurfaceofa marriage, until the point of painful, irrevocable disintegration.

"Thelookofthings,"saysSalter."I've always been drawn to the look of things. That's the way I see the world, and you find a lot of that in the books." Indeed, what unites those books is their incredibly pictorial style, which conjures worldssorichanddetailedtheyarealmostpalpable.Throughsurfaces,Salterreachesthe depths.Thatbeguilingimpressionisticqualityismoststronglyondisplayin LightYears,whichchartsthelivesofa couple from their 20s to their 50s.

"It is full of impressions. Light Years is, in a sense, about the passage of time and the idea behind it was to write a book in which the only thing that was written downwastheimpressionsthatoneremembers, almost as if the book were being written by one of the characters, even though it's not in the first person."

Salter pauses, flicking through this new edition of his novel. "I couldn't possibly tell youwhatisinthatbook.However,on reading it again I recall it."

Does he enjoy meeting his characters again? "I'm not that fond of them. You use them up. I think that's an unfortunate thing that happens with people. If you write about them they are becoming diminished as if you are stealing their reality in a way. Almost all my characters are real."

Salter, who tends to write and publish slowlyandintermittently,hasrecently produced a new collection of compelling short stories, Last Night.

"It's very hard to define a short story," he says. "You can find short stories of only a paragraph long, which I don't like. What is a short story? Not being able to define it, it then becomes a sense of feel or intuition or understanding. It has no set rules. If you write a sonnet you know what that is but not a short story. So it took a few tries before I got a feel for it. I thought I'd like to try it, that's all, nothing more profound than that."

Why does he write? The question was posed to Salter in an interview in The Paris Review back in 1992 and he answered: "Because all this is going to vanish." A decade and a half later, the author is now over 70: does his answer still stand? "Did I say that? Oh I think it's true, though other people have said it other ways. Who said, life isn't complete unless it is written?' Was itGertrudeStein?Anyway,it'snotan original thought. What I said is that you're going to forget the details if you don't take note of them. After a while your eye gets experienced and you know what you're going to need." It is indeed from what Richard Ford calls "an intuition for the world's details" that Salter's work gains its vigorous energy.

"Writing isn't magic, it's just work," says Salter. "You may be touched, blessed from time to time but you can't rely on being blessed, you have to knuckle down and do it yourself. When you write journalism it's consumedandthenthrownaway,but when you're writing a story, you're hoping that perhaps it won't vanish so quickly. I look at writing as a way of preserving things from time. It's a habit now. I'm so accustomed to it. Habit keeps me writing and also the fear of suddenly having no purpose in the world. And also the hope of writing something good."

Given that he has expressed a wish to be appreciated outside literary circles, is Salter concerned about how he'll be remembered when all this has "vanished"? "I would like to have the word strong' applied to me. A strong writer'. You can't know everything, have everything, say everything, do everything. The absolute remains beyond reach. Definitions cannot be entirely successful. I think of life as a struggle. It's not the struggle that the bear has to find something to eat that day. We're beyond that, at least you and me. I mean, it is a struggle being born, it is a struggle finding which way, it is a struggle finding another person, it's a struggleraisingchildren.Thefightgoeson lifelong, the current is against you. But that doesn't matter, we're going on ... "

Salter has survived his own struggles, too, in war, and in relationships - he has been married several times, and the compulsive infidelitiesdescribedinhisfictionare, notoriously, drawn from life. "The challenge cup still lies out there," he says.

Before leaving Salter tells me of a French theatrecriticofthe1920s,wholiveda slovenly life in a house full of cats but with whom he would agree about one thing: "To write, ah! What a wonderful thing,' he said, and that's the answer of why I write. What a marvellous thing."