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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.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Right
Progress
Writing
Either
Trying
Effort
Something
Point
Make
Words
Unflinching
Idea
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Somehow
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More quotes by James Salter

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I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
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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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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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The normal economic system works itself.
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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.
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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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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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.
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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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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
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.
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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
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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.
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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
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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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They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams.
James Salter