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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
Start
Learn
Write
Enough
Writing
Way
Things
Zero
Time
Begin

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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
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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.
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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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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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You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
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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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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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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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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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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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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
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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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You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
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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.
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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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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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I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
James Salter