James Salter - Life Quotes

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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

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

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

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

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

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