Top 100 James Salter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In 1957, I decided: write or perish.”

— James Salter

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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.”

— James Salter

5. “You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it’s true.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

12. “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

13. “There are men who seem destined to always go first, to lead the way. They are confident in life, they are the first to go beyond it. Whatever there is to know, they learn before others. Their very existence gives strength and drives one onward. Love and jealousy were mingled there in the darkness, love and despair.”

— James Salter

14. “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

15. “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

16. “The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.”

— James Salter

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.”

— James Salter

22. “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

23. “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

24. “We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

26. “Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.”

— James Salter

27. “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

28. “I don’t fear death. I’m not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.”

— James Salter

29. “I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.”

— James Salter

30. “There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.”

— James Salter

31. “There was a time, usually late in August, when summer struck the trees with dazzling power and they were rich with leaves but then became, suddenly one day, strangely still, as if in expectation and at that moment aware. They knew. Everything knew, the beetles, the frogs, the crows solemnly walking across the lawn. The sun was at its zenith and embraced the world, but it was ending, all that one loved was at risk.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

33. “Do you know what it is to be really intimate, to feel safe with someone who will never betray you, will never force you to act unlike yourself? That was what we had.”

— James Salter

34. “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

35. “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

36. “The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly; part of this town and happy. I lean out of the window and am washed by the cool air, air it seems no one has yet breathed.”

— James Salter

37. “We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one – we are left with no companion save God. In.”

— James Salter

38. “Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says. Even now, long afterwards, I cannot destroy the images. They remain within me like the yearnings of an addict. I need only hear certain words, see certain gestures, and my thoughts begin to tumble. I despise myself for thinking of her. Even if she were dead, I would feel the same. Her existence blackens my life.”

— James Salter

39. “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

40. “Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.”

— James Salter

41. “It’s just that it’s hard to believe in greatness...”

— James Salter

42. “How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?”

— James Salter

43. “The normal economic system works itself.”

— James Salter

44. “He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance.”

— James Salter

45. “As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.”

— James Salter

46. “She is married. I suppose there are children. They walk together on Sundays, the sunlight falling upon them. They visit friends, talk, go home in the evening, deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired.”

— James Salter

47. “One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there’s an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

49. “It was all leaving her in slow, imperceptible movements, like the tide when one’s back is turned: everyone, everything she had known. So all of grief and happiness, far from being buried with one, vanished beforehand except for scattered pieces. She lived among forgotten episodes, unknown faces bereft of names, closed off from the very world she had created; that was how it came to be. But I must show nothing of that, she thought. Her children – she must not reveal it to them.”

— James Salter

50. “They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams.”

— James Salter