Top 100 James Salter Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— James Salter

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

64. “The normal economic system works itself.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

66. “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

67. “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

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

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

70. “What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.”

— James Salter

71. “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

72. “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

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

— James Salter

74. “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

75. “When Vivian began to recover they brought her a fluted glass vase with an arrangement of lilies and yellow roses from the flower shop on Eighteenth Street owned by an elegant man Arthur had once been involved with, Christos, who was friends with both of them. He, too, loved the theater and everything about it. Later he opened a restaurant.”

— James Salter

76. “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

77. “If you can overcome the occasional angst, you may have the chance to see some interesting things, perhaps the same things the tour buses bring people to see, but purified by solitude, if you will. In any case, do not stay in the hotel room. That is the only place you are vulnerable.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

79. “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

80. “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.”

— James Salter

81. “Babel werd nooit moe zijn verhalen te herschrijven. Hij zei dat er in een volzin ergens een soort hefboompje zat waarop je de hand kon leggen om er een heel kleine, maar precies goede draai mee te geven, niet te veel, niet te weinig, waarna alles op zijn plaats viel.”

— James Salter

82. “He unrolls names like a splendid carpet.”

— James Salter

83. “It’s ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help.” “Are you reading Alma Mahler again?” “No.” Her voice was even and knowing. The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs.”

— James Salter

84. “Leven is het weer. Leven is maaltijden. Lunch op een blauw-geruit kleed waar zout op is gemorst. De geur van tabak. Brie, gele appels, messen met houten handvaten.”

— James Salter

85. “There are men who seem to have seized the trunk of life, and he was one of them. It might not be for everyone, the great, scarring thing you could not get your arms around, but it was there for him.”

— James Salter

86. “Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

88. “Dresscodes are for styleless people.”

— James Salter

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

— James Salter

90. “We think of Rome as an empire in a way that we do not use for other nations. The others are pretenders. Rome stands alone. Throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Near East its wreckage still draws the traveler and speaks a message that is haunting: this was imperial, this was lasting, this is gone.”

— James Salter

91. “I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.”

— James Salter

92. “His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he ever knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.”

— James Salter

93. “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

94. “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

95. “If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen.”

— James Salter

96. “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

97. “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

98. “She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes, like fever, of contentment. I am beyond fear of solitude, she thought, I am past it. The idea thrilled her. I am beyond it and I will not sink. This submission, this triumph made her stronger. It was as if finally, after having passed through inferior stages, her life had found a form worthy of it.”

— James Salter

99. “He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights, each one perilous as a lunar journey. He.”

— James Salter

100. “A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.”

— James Salter