James Salter Quotes

The most valuable aid I have found in teaching is to remember my own experiences as a student.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

A woman can tell me about her having a baby, but I'll never know what it is to have a baby.

I don't cast somebody that I think is like my younger self.

So much of listening to lyrically driven music is projecting your own feelings and experiences into the music.

My mother had been blind as a child. And so, blindness was something that has long fascinated me, but also it's something I find really, really scary.

When I first moved to L.A., I discovered Roy London. I didn't know anything about the arts, the profession; I had no technique, I knew nothing, I'm fresh from Missouri. I sat in on a few classes, and they just felt a little guru-ish and just didn't feel right to me. Until I met Roy.

What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

I try to see everything I do. It's a good learning tool for me. You kind of remember what you were going for when you were shooting it, and then see how it comes across in the context of what comes before and after it.

Pictures bring you inside, whether you see yourself driving a new car or as a hapless prisoner who is being abused.

You learn something from everyone, even the bad coaches because they tell you something and you think, 'I'll never do that in the future.'

You try to get mental reps through the eyes of others, then it's your job to kind of get your reps through your eyes. So that's kind of what I do.

I take inspiration from my own experiences and from other people's experiences.

When people ask me a personal question, I answer it in a personal way. I can only speak from the footsteps and the shoes that I've walked in.

I am a black woman, and my experiences would not be what they are if I wasn't. I'm so happy to share those experiences for other people to be able to learn from them.

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.

He who feels it, knows it more.

It's up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything they know about life and emotions.

Experience is stronger than belief. Once we have experiences our mind begins to open. This works better than me forcing my own experience or knowledge onto anyone. Show them how to have their own experiences.

We do not actually know other people; we only know our judgments.

Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case.

Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.