Quote

I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what Im hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.

James Salter

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Keep
Hoping
Find
Imperfect
Writing
Exactly
Trying
View
Perhaps
Views
Maybe
Fragments
Write
Portions

More quotes by 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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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.
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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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You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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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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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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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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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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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
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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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Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.
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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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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.
James Salter
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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
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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