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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
Moments
Past
Sometimes
Great
Happenings
People
Rise
Happening
Aware
Perhaps

More quotes by James Salter

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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
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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.
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
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I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
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I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what Im hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.
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You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
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Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
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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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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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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
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You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
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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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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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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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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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Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't avoid being involved with a book, caring about it, even if it's not a particularly good book. You're in it, and you're committed to it.
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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 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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