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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.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Life
Books
Fruits
Difficult
Dwell
Certain
Beast
Meteorological
Persons
Landscape
Lizards
Book
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Assemble
Matter
Among
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Really
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Beasts
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Referring

More quotes by 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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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
James Salter
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Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.
James Salter
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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
James Salter
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
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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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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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
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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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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
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.
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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A film writer is very much like a party girl. While you're good-looking and still unlined, the possibilities seem endless. But your appeal doesn't last long and you're quickly discarded.
James Salter
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I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
James Salter
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The normal economic system works itself.
James Salter
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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
James Salter
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Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
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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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