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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Passes
Pages
Anything
Life

More quotes by James Salter

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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.
James Salter
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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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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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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
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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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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The normal economic system works itself.
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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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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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
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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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
James Salter
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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
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.
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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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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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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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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I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
James Salter