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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Realizations
Dreamed
Realization
Lasts
Last
Great
Life

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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.
James Salter
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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
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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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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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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.
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The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.
James Salter
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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
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You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
James Salter
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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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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
James Salter
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The normal economic system works itself.
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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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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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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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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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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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
James Salter