Quote

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
Find
Reach
Right
Progress
Writing
Either
Trying
Effort
Something
Point
Make
Words
Unflinching
Idea
Continual
Ideas
Somehow

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
James Salter
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
James Salter
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He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
James Salter
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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.
James Salter
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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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I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
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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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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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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
James Salter
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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
James Salter