Top 100 James Salter Quotes
#1. Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.
James Salter
#2. Suddenly I am crushed by the simplicity of it all: he is leaving.
James Salter
#3. Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
James Salter
#4. I've always said that I felt women are more heroic.
James Salter
#5. Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
James Salter
#6. In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.
James Salter
#7. Certain people can keep a word tune, so to speak, and certain people cannot. And, above all, certain people can tell a story, and other people can't. They don't hear that point where something else has to come.
James Salter
#8. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must remember that
James Salter
#9. He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights, each one perilous as a lunar journey. He
James Salter
#10. My first book was published without any editorial advice. Nobody said, 'You might do this or that,' or 'Why don't we see more of this.' I merely took the book and published it.
James Salter
#11. I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords.
James Salter
#12. It's possible of course, especially when you're young, to read a book and take it to your heart. And you don't need to speak to anybody about it - it's so important to you: You have found it.
James Salter
#13. The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions.
James Salter
#14. When she said goodbye it was like a play ending. It was like the theater and coming out again to the streets.
James Salter
#15. I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.
James Salter
#16. I have said many times I don't want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That's not who I am. I devoted the subsequent 50 years - more - to writing.
James Salter
#17. I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
James Salter
#18. Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.
James Salter
#19. It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.
James Salter
#20. Incandescent afternoons in Spain, the shutters closed, a blade of sun burning into the darkness.
James Salter
#21. 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.
James Salter
#22. Suddenly I like him. Cristina can't take her eyes away. She asks when he was born, and it turns out he's a Sagittarius which is a very good sign.
'Really?'
'It's one of the best for me,' she says. 'Scorpio is the worst.
James Salter
#23. There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.
James Salter
#24. She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence - she is made out of yesterdays.
James Salter
#25. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.
James Salter
#26. They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams.
James Salter
#27. It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible - the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred's, a horse that ran and won.
James Salter
#28. There were other houses that always brought images of an orderly life, kitchens with plain sideboards, old windows, the comforts of marriage in their common form, which at times surpassed everything - breakfast in the morning, conversations, late hours, and nothing that suggested excess or decay.
James Salter
#29. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
James Salter
#30. DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist's wax, the organ has been gutted.
James Salter
#31. It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.
James Salter
#32. I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it's disheartening; you don't want to go on. That's what I think is hard - the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done.
James Salter
#33. Normally, what you're envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels ... almost nonexistent things.
James Salter
#35. We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives ...
James Salter
#36. I'd say the biggest relationship is the repetition of certain themes. I don't want to say "topics," but certain points of interest.
James Salter
#37. There is no situation like the open road, and seeing things completely afresh. I'm used to traveling. It's not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It's the curtain coming up on another act.
James Salter
#38. A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold.
James Salter
#39. He was the friend of my life. You know, you only have one friend like that; there can't be two.
James Salter
#40. His devotion is complete; he is beginning to sense the confusion that arises from the first fears of what life would be like without her. He knows there can be such a thing, but like the answer to a difficult problem, he cannot imagine it.
James Salter
#41. He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older.
James Salter
#42. She preferred to lie up by the dunes with the waves bursting, to listen while they crashed like the final chords of a symphony except they went on and on. There was nothing as fine as that.
James Salter
#43. There came a time when I felt I was not going to be satisfied with life unless I could write.
James Salter
#44. The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.
James Salter
#45. For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, the lines are ready, everything is there.
James Salter
#46. Do you know what it is to be really intimate, to feel safe with someone who will never betray you, will never force you to act unlike yourself? That was what we had.
James Salter
#47. I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.
James Salter
#48. I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what I'm hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.
James Salter
#49. If you can overcome the occasional angst, you may have the chance to see some interesting things, perhaps the same things the tour buses bring people to see, but purified by solitude, if you will. In any case, do not stay in the hotel room. That is the only place you are vulnerable.
James Salter
#50. I spent the night on a sliver of rock high up on the east face of Long's Peak, climbing with Tom Frost, and slept at the icy feet of the Dru, listening to the lightning crack above me and the thunder roll down. I only did it to write about it. I would never go up on the Grotto Wall for fun.
James Salter
#51. I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
James Salter
#52. You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
James Salter
#53. The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It's a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.
James Salter
#54. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.
James Salter
#55. 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.
James Salter
#56. 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.
James Salter
#57. 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.
James Salter
#58. A name, of course is like a piece of clothing, isn't it? It gives you an impression right away.
James Salter
#60. God is the God of the people who are at their wits end, who are right up against it with their backs to the wall, and He delights to come to our help when we need Him most.
James Salter
#61. West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view.
James Salter
#62. I've known the anxiety of being completely lost, flying at night. It can be extreme. You're travelling at close to five hundred miles an hour, and every minute that goes by takes you further into being lost unless you get help from ground radar somewhere or somehow figure out the error.
James Salter
#63. Most writers can write three times as many books as I have and still live a life.
James Salter
#64. I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.
James Salter
#65. I don't hold myself dictated to by what everyone is saying, by the tabloids or popular opinion. I don't like bourgeois values. I say you find your own way to live.
James Salter
#66. 'The Paris Review' was always the pinnacle: it was the place to be published. You were thrilled if you were published in 'The Paris Review,' and George Plimpton himself was practically mythical. He was a legendary figure.
James Salter
#67. It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.
James Salter
#68. As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.
James Salter
#69. I've made an effort to nurture the feminine in myself. I don't mean overtly, but in terms of response to things.
James Salter
#71. On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.
James Salter
#73. Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.
James Salter
#74. The heart is in darkness, unknowing, like those animals in mines that have never seen the day. It has no loyalties, no hopes; it has its task.
James Salter
#75. The deepest instinct is to want to do something enduring, something worthwhile, and to be engaged by that, whether one achieves it or not.
James Salter
#76. I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
James Salter
#77. If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.
James Salter
#78. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one's child.
James Salter
#79. But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.
James Salter
#80. Every nation feels itself to be superior, but in America it's a jaunty feeling, and in some cases a rather ominous one among the super-patriots.
James Salter
#81. They had a great deal in common, Bowman a little defiantly said. What they had in common was more vital than similar interests
it was wordless understanding and accord. It was love, the furnace into which everything is dropped.
James Salter
#82. There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams ...
James Salter
#83. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
James Salter
#84. Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.
James Salter
#85. Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
James Salter
#86. I deem as heroic those who have the harder task, face it unflinchingly and live. In this world women do that.
James Salter
#87. You're so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
James Salter
#88. Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
James Salter
#89. Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.
James Salter
#90. It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.
James Salter
#91. There are men who seem to have seized the trunk of life, and he was one of them. It might not be for everyone, the great, scarring thing you could not get your arms around, but it was there for him.
James Salter
#92. The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as 'fiction' and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called 'nonfiction' strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.
James Salter
#93. He knew all the constellations. He had seen them rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts.
James Salter
#94. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.
James Salter
#95. 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 had.
James Salter
#96. One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.
James Salter
#98. She had lost interest in her marriage. There was nothing else to say. It was a prison.
'No, I'll tell you what it is , I'm indifferent to it . I am bored with happy couples. I don't believe in them. They're false.They're deceiving themselves.
James Salter
#99. My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy on every page. I suppose I am trying to write such a book.
James Salter
#100. What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.
James Salter
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