James Salter Short Quotes

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

James Salter

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

James Salter

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

James Salter

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

James Salter

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

James Salter

You're so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.

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

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

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

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

James Salter

I didn't know what made me write at the beginning, but later I understood. It's simple: the one who writes it keeps it.

James Salter

France is herself Only in the winter, her naked self, without manners. In the fine weather, all the world can love her.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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.

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

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