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Your parents are the parents you know best. Your brother and sister, if you have them, are the brother and sister you know best. They may not be the ones you like the best. They may not be the most interesting, but they are the closest and probably the clearest to you.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
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More quotes by James Salter

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Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the first time. It was still an adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening.
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Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits.
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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.
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Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
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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.
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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.
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Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.
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They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams.
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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.
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You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
James Salter
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
James Salter
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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
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You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
James Salter
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If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.
James Salter
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I'd given up everything to be a writer, and if I didn't then go on to do that - to write - then I didn't know what would happen to me.
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I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
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