James Salter

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

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

— 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

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

I'm a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if…

— James Salter

“As I think of it, there’s an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie…

— James Salter

“One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It…

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

“Anne-Marie Costallat, born October 8, 1944. I was beginning high school and masturbating twice a day, curling over it like a dead…

— James Salter

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk,…

— 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…

— James Salter

“They ate dinner in silence. Her husband did not look at her. her face annoyed him, he did not know why. She…

— James Salter

In climbing, being first-rate is part of the whole enterprise. The important climbers want to be the first man up the mountain,…

— James Salter

Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't…

— James Salter

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside.…

— James Salter

“It’s ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help.” “Are you reading Alma Mahler again?” “No.”…

— James Salter

Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground,…

— James Salter

“Dean is still asleep. His clothes are strewn about. The shutters are closed. He never dreams. He’s like a dead musician, like…

— James Salter

Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are…

— James Salter

“It was easy to find things she would like. Our taste was the same, it had been from the first. It would…

— James Salter

“THEY WERE DIVORCED IN THE fall. I wish it could have been otherwise. The clarity of those autumn days affected them both.…

— James Salter

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The…

— James Salter

“Miyata was fluent and intelligent. Nothing was beyond his curiosity. He seemed to be above the confusion of life, as if he…

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been…

— James Salter

“I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must remember that”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

A name, of course is like a piece of clothing, isn't it? It gives you an impression right away.

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.

— James Salter

The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be…

— James Salter