James Salter Quotes

People are incredible creatures of habit.

I'm a big routine guy. I have to have everything in threes.

Themes recur again and again in my work.

The way we do anything is the way we do everything.

We think continuity's important.

Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.

If you want to become good at something, do it as often as possible. If you want to become an expert at it, do it every day.

That's what life is: repetitive routines. It's a matter of finding the balance between deviating from those patterns and knowing when to repeat them.

I find sometimes that if you do too many takes, it starts to become meaningless to me. It is hard to sustain it for me. I don't want to do too many.

There are a lot of very strong connections with music and mathematics. They both can work in patterns and sequences and repetitions.

Whoever has character also has his typical experience, which returns over and over again.

There are no accidents; success is the result of doing the right thing, in the right way, over and over.

I try my best to find variety in what I'm doing, but there's a lot out there that's the same.

If you want your business to survive for 100 years, you've got to make it through every single day for 100 years. It's not enough to do it 99.9% of the time.

If you want to know what your true beliefs are- take a look at your actions.

If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it.

A certain harmony should be kept between actions and ideas if we want to fully develop the effects they can produce.

You might reduce Lombardi's coaching philosophy to a single sentence: In any game, you do the things you do best and you do them over and over and over.

The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.

To work effectively in a film, you have to repeat and work consistently. Basically, you shoot a big master then you do close-ups. You're supposed to be in the same moment, the same 30-second moment, for a day.

Style is besides the point. Nobody would pay attention if one always said the same thing, in the same words and the same tone of voice.

I'm kind of a creature of habit. Once I get used to doing things, it's like second nature.

What I want now is what I've always wanted.

I want to stick around with the big boys. I don't want to be in the old folks home.

If you have very few experiences in your life, romantically, or whatever you're doing, then of course you're going to talk about those, because there were only a few of them - as opposed to the people who repeat patterns, always at the bar, always with someone, always blah blah blah.