Quote

Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.

James Salter

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Events
Start
Need
Needs
Dissolution
Invitation
Invitations

More quotes by James Salter

Image
One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
James Salter
Image
If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.
James Salter
Image
I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
James Salter
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
James Salter
Image
You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
James Salter
Image
Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
James Salter
Image
The normal economic system works itself.
James Salter
Image
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
Image
I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
James Salter
Image
ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
James Salter
Image
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
Image
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
Image
But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
James Salter
Image
You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer is lucky enough to still have a few books around after he's gone, a few that are still being read, then he's accomplished quite a lot.
James Salter
Image
Dresscodes are for styleless people.
James Salter
Image
Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
James Salter
Image
Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't avoid being involved with a book, caring about it, even if it's not a particularly good book. You're in it, and you're committed to it.
James Salter
Image
They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. 'It wouldn't work. It's the attraction of opposites,' he said. We're not opposites.' I don't mean just you and me. 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