James Salter Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type. And then I retype, correct, retype, and keep going until it's finished. It's been demonstrated to me many times that there is some inefficiency in this, but I find that the ease of moving a paragraph is not really what I need.

James Salter
Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one's own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.

James Salter
Everything that meant anything to me — the Pentagon, Georgetown, flying out of Andrews, everything I had done in life up to that point, I was throwing away. I felt absolutely miserable — miserable and a failure.

James Salter
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. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

James Salter
He seems very mournful, but there is all the winter still to be survived. He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights.

James Salter
The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four -the years turn dry as leaves.'

James Salter
I'm not the first person who feels that it's the writer's true occupation to travel. 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.

James Salter
Well, life is an ordeal, isn't it? You're continually being tested. It doesn't seem unusual to me to pick an apex or a dramatic instant of this testing. It's a conventional device of storytelling. And, of course, courage is in there sometimes.

James Salter
You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.

James Salter
I was from the suburbs. I had a wife, children, the entire manifest. Even in the city I found it hard to believe I was working on anything of interest.

James Salter
I deem as heroic those who have the harder task, face it unflinchingly and live. In this world women do that.

James Salter
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
I like to write. I'm moved by writing. One can't analyze it beyond that.

James Salter
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
Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the first time. It was still an adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening.

James Salter
We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives...

James Salter
He nestles himself flat in the meeting of her buttocks. An excruciating douche.

James Salter
They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. 'It wouldn't work. It's the attraction of opposites,' he said. We're not opposites.' I don't mean just you and me. Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they're ready to leave.

James Salter
Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing. You want short sentences and long sentences—well, every writer knows that. You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make your writing agreeable to read.

James Salter
I believe there's a right way to live and to die. The people who can do that are interesting to me.

James Salter
ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.

James Salter
Writing is not a science, and of course there are exceptions, but every writer I know and admire has essentially drawn either from his own life or his knowledge of things in life. Great dialogue, for instance, is very difficult to invent. Almost all great books have actual people in them.

James Salter
Movie writers... are among the most overpaid people on earth. In a certain sense you would do a movie for nothing, just for the fun of doing it. In addition to that, you are lavishly paid.

James Salter
A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold.

James Salter
As his prick goes into her, he discovers the world. He knows the source of numbers, the path of the stars.

James Salter
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
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
I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

James Salter
You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales.

James Salter
I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one's child.

James Salter