James Salter famous quotes

To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.
-- James Salter

#Book #Writing #Past

Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.
-- James Salter

#Waiting #Bones #Break

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

#Dream #Real #Writing

I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.
-- James Salter

#Powerful #Tired #Ice

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

#Falling In Love #Men #Opposites

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

#Children #Real #Drunk

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

#Tasks #World #Faces

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.
-- James Salter

#Past #Long #Important

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.
-- James Salter

#Hands #Likes #Wonder

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
-- James Salter

#Book #Rivers #Illumination

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
-- James Salter

#Reading #Color #People

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

#Adventure #White #Feelings

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

#Past #People #Sometimes

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don’t.
-- James Salter

#Writing #Ideas #Effort

Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.
-- James Salter

#Enthusiasm #States

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

#Claims

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

#Men #Storm #Months

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

#Zero #Writing #Way

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

#Writing #Internet #Flowering

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.
-- James Salter

#Writing #Views #Trying

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.
-- James Salter

#Writing #Ideas #People

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.
-- James Salter

#Writing

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.
-- James Salter

#Tabloids #Way #Opinion

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
-- James Salter

#Feelings #Aristocracy

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.
-- James Salter

#Writing #Who I Am #Years

Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.
-- James Salter

#Children #Believe #Successful

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

#Dream #Struggle #Hands

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

#Accidents

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

#Morning #Two #Long

Your parents are the parents you know best. Your brother and sister, if you have them, are the brother and sister you know best. They may not be the ones you like the best. They may not be the most interesting, but they are the closest and probably the clearest to you.
-- James Salter

#Brother #Interesting #Parent

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits.
-- James Salter

#Book #Landscape #Matter

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

#Oxygen #Vacuums #Steel

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

#Believe #Should

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

#Moving #Games #Life Is Like

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

#Satanic #Firsts #Lovers

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

#Spills

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards. Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it. A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer.
-- James Salter

#Book #Landscape #Letters

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

#Falling In Love #Mean #Men

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

#Believe #Greatness #Hard To Believe

Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
-- James Salter

#Events #Needs #Invitations

Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
-- James Salter

#Intense #Impatient

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

#Realization #Lasts

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

#Believe

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

#Successful #Men

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.
-- James Salter

#Dream #Lying #Fall

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
-- James Salter

#Writing #Novel #Great Things

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything,
-- James Salter

#Pages

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

#Book #Ideas #Levels

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

#Writing #Impulse #Ultimate

Dresscodes are for styleless people.
-- James Salter

#People

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

#Past #Design #Sifting

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

#Solitude #Benefits #Difficult

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.
-- James Salter

#Girl #Party #Long

Life is weather.  Life is meals,
-- James Salter

#Weather #Meals #Life Is

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

#Moving #Outsiders #Natural

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

#Intense #Inequality

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

#Summer #Morning #Garden

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

#Light #Snow #Cold

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

#Real #Past #Patterns

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
-- James Salter

#Dream #Reality #Skeletons

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

#Lying #Flower #Passion