James Salter Quotes

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.

Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.

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

Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.

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

I'm a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible.

Dresscodes are for styleless people.

Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.

What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

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.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.

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

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.

It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.

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

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...

One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.

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.

Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.

Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.

As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.

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.

But that isn't my life. 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.

I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist.

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.

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.

I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.

Life is weather. Life is meals.

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

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

Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.

The normal economic system works itself.

I'd say the biggest relationship is the repetition of certain themes. I don't want to say "topics," but certain points of interest.

Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.

I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.

On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.

It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.

I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what Im hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.

You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.

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

I'd given up everything to be a writer, and if I didn't then go on to do that - to write - then I didn't know what would happen to me.

Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.

It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness.