James Salter Quotes

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson.

Only photograph what you love.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

I really wanted there to be something in my life that I enjoy just for the beauty of it.

Land really is the best art.

Life isn't always really glamorous and fabulous. It's about encouraging people to go back to natural beauty.

To enjoy the rainbow, first enjoy the rain.

Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun.

Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.

Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom, golden in the green grass, This life can be. Common as a dandelion-blossom, beautiful in the clean grass, not beautiful Because common, beautiful because beautiful, Noble because common, because free.

Simplify, slow down, be kind. And don't forget to have art in your life - music, paintings, theater, dance, and sunsets.

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

There are fine things that are more brilliant when they are unfinished than when finished too much.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is exactly that. Friendship and love and passion for movies and cartoons and comic books, whatever it is that you love. Most of the way we live our lives involves looking for pleasure and beauty and happiness and affection. Real artists don't use reflexive clichés about things. It's about honoring the reality of people's lives, which defies conventions and clichés and expectations. People are interesting, period.

But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.

All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.

A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

My message behind this album was finding the beauty in imperfection.

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

I feel that any man that tries, any man that comes out with something we like, is a good man. A man doesn't have to be Leonardo Da Vinci to be sincere.

The older you get, the more you should learn to love life and appreciate the beauty that comes with age.