{"author":"James Salter","author_id":"James+Salter","total_quotes":28,"quotes":[{"text":"Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.","author":"James Salter","tags":["writers","writers-on-writing","writing"],"id":4467,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"You must go further than I did,' Nedra said. 'You know that.'Further?'With your life. You must become free.'She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.","author":"James Salter","tags":["freedom","mothers-and-daughters","risk","women"],"id":5512,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.","author":"James Salter","tags":["imperfection","real","without "],"id":13718,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"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.","author":"James Salter","tags":["life","always","natural "],"id":67879,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.","author":"James Salter","tags":["art","beauty","great "],"id":121821,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"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.","author":"James Salter","tags":["child","parent"],"id":122808,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"...Alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. 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 whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.","author":"James Salter","tags":["aging","faith","loneliness","regret","selfishness"],"id":152446,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. 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.","author":"James Salter","tags":["family","forest","metaphor","people","trees"],"id":162798,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.","author":"James Salter","tags":["aging"],"id":162955,"author_id":"James+Salter"},{"text":"There comes a time in life, when you realize that everything is a dream; only those things which are written down have any possibility of being real.","author":"James Salter","tags":["books","life-philosophy","words"],"id":167111,"author_id":"James+Salter"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":28,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}