James Salter Quotes

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to lif...

His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned someth...

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your per...

there comes a time in life, when you realize that everything is a dream; only those things which are...

If you can overcome the occasional angst, you may have the chance to see some interesting things, pe...

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in ...

He was the friend of my life. You know, you only have one friend like that; there can't be two.

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the an...

She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushe...

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended...

Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you ...

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked fo...

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

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

I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind...

For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, the lines are ready, everything is there.

Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.

He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives ...

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

It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the pr...

...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days....

You must go further than I did," Nedra said. "You know that.""Further?""With your life. You must bec...

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragr...

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of...

I can't explain it. It's what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can't do and what y...

There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.

They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortab...

I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparab...

Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything...