Top 100 Salter Quotes
#1. James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.
Sarah Hall
#2. I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they're pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.
Heidi Julavits
#3. I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.
J.R. Moehringer
#4. K-turned across the width of Janet Salter's street. The
Lee Child
#5. Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
Susan Sontag
#6. If you wrote about sex the way Jim [Salter] writes about sex in nonfiction, you would be a sociopath.
Lorin Stein
#7. James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly.
Edward Hirsch
#8. You were in the equipment shed with Corn Fritter?"
"Corndog," Will, Dr. Salter, and I say simultaneously.
Miranda Kenneally
#9. William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.
Jennifer Haigh
#10. James Salter has been a fighter pilot, a rogue, and a climber. He counts Robert Redford as a friend.
Stephen Rodrick
#11. I intend that my last work shall be a cookbook composed of memories and desires.
Alexander Dumas, 1869, as quoted in Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days by James and Kay Salter
Alexandre Dumas
#12. 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
#13. Suddenly I am crushed by the simplicity of it all: he is leaving.
James Salter
#14. I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.
Richard Salter Storrs
#15. Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
James Salter
#16. I've always said that I felt women are more heroic.
James Salter
#17. Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
James Salter
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must remember that
James Salter
#21. 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
#22. Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.
James Salter
#23. There comes a time in life, when you realize that everything is a dream; only those things which are written down have any possibility of being real.
James Salter
#24. 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
#25. Just as soon as any conviction of important truth becomes central and vital, there comes the desire to utter it a desire which is immediate and irresistible. Sacrifice is gladness, service is joy, when such an idea becomes a commanding power.
Richard Salter Storrs
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
James Salter
#29. The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions.
James Salter
#30. THERE ARE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT marriage. I love the familiarity of it," Nedra said. "It's like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it's implanted in your skin, you can't get rid of it. You're hardly even aware of it any more. I suppose I'm very conventional," she decided.
James Salter
#31. When she said goodbye it was like a play ending. It was like the theater and coming out again to the streets.
James Salter
#32. Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous, never lose their power.
James Salter
#33. When he undressed at night he was like a diplomat or a judge. A white body, gentle and powerless, emerged from his clothes, his position in the world lay tumbled on the floor, fallen from his ankles ...
James Salter
#34. I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.
James Salter
#35. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly; part of this town and happy. I lean out of the window and am washed by the cool air, air it seems no one has yet breathed.
James Salter
#36. 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
#37. I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
James Salter
#38. Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.
James Salter
#39. Money is that dear thing which,
if you're not careful, you can squander
your whole life thinking of ...
Mary Jo Salter
#40. Mountains clothed in snow
Robed in white against blue skies
Mirrored in the lake.
Timothy Salter
#41. 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
#42. Incandescent afternoons in Spain, the shutters closed, a blade of sun burning into the darkness.
James Salter
#43. Having friends was really important, wasn't it? Even if sometimes they did stuff which upset you?
Helen Salter
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist.
James Salter
#47. Anne-Marie Costallat, born October 8, 1944. I was beginning high school and masturbating twice a day, curling over it like a dead leaf, when she was born, in a bed of violets, as she says - all French mothers tell their children that.
James Salter
#48. What it is ... is a place where I can return to myself. It's enough of a scramble to get to ... that the energy expended is significant, and it translates into a change in my body chemistry and my psychological chemistry and my heart chemistry ...
Jay Salter
#49. As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.
James Salter
#50. They ate dinner in silence. Her husband did not look at her. her face annoyed him, he did not know why. She could be good-looking but there were times when she was not. Her face was like a series of photographs, some of which ought to have been thrown away. Tonight it was like that.
James Salter
#51. There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.
James Salter
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it.
James Salter
#55. As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe the possibility exists.
William Salter
#56. 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
#57. Love must wait; it must break one's bones.
James Salter
#58. Somebody needs to invent a shower for the mind, not just the body.
Anna C. Salter
#59. It isn't what happens to you in your life that destroys you. It's what you do about it.
Aimee L. Salter
#60. I wasn't about to tell him that I never said anything to anyone who teased me. I just went along with it like it was my joke too. I wanted everyone to like me ...
Sydney Salter
#61. It wasn't so hard being like your parents or 180 degrees the other way. What was hard was not being one way or the other.
Anna C. Salter
#62. 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
#64. As a writer, you aren't anybody until you become somebody.
James Salter
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.
Mary Jo Salter
#70. It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.
James Salter
#72. I can't explain it. It's what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can't do and what you must do. You just turn to dust.
James Salter
#73. 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
#74. Normally, what you're envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels ... almost nonexistent things.
James Salter
#75. You don't have anything to lose by standing up for yourself,' Nando said. 'But you can lose yourself by trying to please everyone.
Sydney Salter
#76. Like books you will never have the chance to read, there are languages you do not know, and you're not going to get a chance to learn, so you'll never really know what was written, only the approximation.
James Salter
#78. And I said to myself, here's the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough.
Mary Jo Salter
#79. We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives ...
James Salter
#80. 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
#81. You have to keep going. You have to. If you push through this, you'll show them. You'll show them you didn't deserve this.
Aimee L. Salter
#82. 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
#83. A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold.
James Salter
#84. He was the friend of my life. You know, you only have one friend like that; there can't be two.
James Salter
#85. 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
#86. You don't have to feed the lie if you don't want it to. If you make it credible it will become that, but only in your mind and only as disproportionate as you've decided it is. Truth has a way of being more persistent and if the two ever meet, truth will win.
Howard L. Salter
#87. Malevolence takes a bite out off your spirit. Just sitting with it, just talking with people who consciously and deliberately exploit others, feels like being beaten. Over the years, l have seen many therapists burn out and leave the field entirely. [Refers to treating sex offenders, p6]
Anna C. Salter
#88. People you love should always be more important than people who judge you.
Aimee L. Salter
#89. You have your brains, but it's energy and desire that make you write a book.
James Salter
#90. He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older.
James Salter
#91. Because this isn't the movies, Doc. In the real world, when a seventeen-year-old guy gets a love letter from his best friend, he doesn't suddenly decide to love her back. He runs screaming.
Aimee L. Salter
#92. Narcissists ... have the least sense of self of anybody on the planet.
Anna C. Salter
#93. O May my Song arise like Morning day,
And bid me look upon the break of light.
Timothy Salter
#94. 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
#95. The writing workshops and programs that are everywhere have encouraged writing. And if that produces more writing, it's also producing more readers of an elevated level. So all in all, a good thing.
James Salter
#96. There came a time when I felt I was not going to be satisfied with life unless I could write.
James Salter
#97. 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
#98. Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.
James Salter
#99. For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, the lines are ready, everything is there.
James Salter
#100. Summer mornings, the light of the world pouring in and the silence. It was a barefoot life, the cool of the night on the floorboards, the green trees if you stepped outside, the first faint cries of the birds. He arrived in a suit and didn't put it on again until he went back to the city.
James Salter
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