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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Easily
Believe
Life
Vanish
Strongly

More quotes by James Salter

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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.
James Salter
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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.
James Salter
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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.
James Salter
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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.
James Salter
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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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.
James Salter
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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.
James Salter
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The normal economic system works itself.
James Salter
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
James Salter
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Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.
James Salter
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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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Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
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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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.
James Salter
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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.
James Salter
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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.
James Salter
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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
James Salter
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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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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
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
James Salter