Top 100 James Salter Quotes (2026 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. “Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.”

— James Salter

8. “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

9. “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

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

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

— James Salter

16. “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

17. “They ate dinner in silence. Her husband did not look at her. her face annoyed him, he did not know why. She could be good-looking but there were times when she was not. Her face was like a series of photographs, some of which ought to have been thrown away. Tonight it was like that.”

— James Salter

18. “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

19. “The classic decision is always the same, whether to retreat or go on. There comes a time when it is easier to continue upward, when the summit, in fact, is the only way out. At such a moment one must still have strength.”

— James Salter

20. “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

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

— James Salter

22. “Suddenly I am crushed by the simplicity of it all: he is leaving.”

— James Salter

23. “She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It’s all in silence – she is made out of yesterdays.”

— James Salter

24. “Greatness is something which can be regarded in a number of ways,” he said. “It is, of course, the apotheosis, man raised to his highest powers, but it also can be, in a way, like insanity, a certain kind of imbalance, a flaw, in most cases a beneficial flaw, an anomaly, an accident.” “Well, many great men are eccentric,” Viri said, “even narrow.” “Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.”

— James Salter

25. “Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.”

— James Salter

26. “He had never been particularly young, or to put it another way, he had been young for a long time and now was at his true age, old enough for civilized comfrots and not too old for the primal ones.”

— James Salter

27. “She comes to life with a soft exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning.”

— James Salter

28. “His devotion is complete; he is beginning to sense the confusion that arises from the first fears of what life would be like without her. He knows there can be such a thing, but like the answer to a difficult problem, he cannot imagine it.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

31. “It’s tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.”

— James Salter

32. “When she said goodbye it was like a play ending. It was like the theater and coming out again to the streets.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

34. “Every glance made him need another.”

— James Salter

35. “Like Lucifer, he creates darkness as he descends.”

— James Salter

36. “She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.”

— James Salter

37. “One thing about Faulkner I like, apart from the simplicity, on the whole, of his life, was that he wrote on the bedroom walls. That seems to me the true mark of a writer.”

— James Salter

38. “She’s not young, but rather in the midst of that last and most confident beauty, like the mother of a schoolmate. You see her emerging from a car, the flash of an elegant calf, and you are tumbled into unbearable love.”

— James Salter

39. “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

40. “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

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

— James Salter

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

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

— James Salter

47. “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

48. “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

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

— James Salter

50. “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