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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.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Perhaps
Moments
Past
Sometimes
Great
Happenings
People
Rise
Happening
Aware

More quotes by James Salter

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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
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You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.
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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
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You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer is lucky enough to still have a few books around after he's gone, a few that are still being read, then he's accomplished quite a lot.
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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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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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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. 'It wouldn't work. It's the attraction of opposites,' he said. We're not opposites.' I don't mean just you and me. 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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I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
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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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I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling there have been grand chords.
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You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
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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.
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Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.
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I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
James Salter
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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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He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
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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.
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