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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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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Enough
Writing
Way
Things
Zero
Time
Begin
Start
Learn
Write

More quotes by James Salter

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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
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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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Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.
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The normal economic system works itself.
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I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
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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.
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Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
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You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
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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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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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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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.
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Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.
James Salter
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
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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Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.
James Salter
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You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
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 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