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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Afraid
Successful
Men
Love

More quotes by James Salter

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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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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.
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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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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
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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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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
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I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
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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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I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
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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 are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
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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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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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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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Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
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.
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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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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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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
James Salter