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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
Sometimes
Great
Happenings
People
Rise
Happening
Aware
Perhaps
Moments
Past

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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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Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
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You write for glory. You play for glory. There's an ambition to excel, isn't there, to be a star? To score more, to do more, even when it's a team sport. So I think striving for glory is a natural subject for a writer. Seeking fame.
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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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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
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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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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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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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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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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
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You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
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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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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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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
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The normal economic system works itself.
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I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
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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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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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Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.
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