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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

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James Salter
Aircraft Pilot
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Resources
Brush
Comes
Brushes
Live
Occasional
Sometimes
Sunlight
Real
Streams
Levis
Luxury
Cheaply
Teeth
Indolence
Touch
Travelling

More quotes by James Salter

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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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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
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You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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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.
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Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
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.
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.
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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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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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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
James Salter
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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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I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
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
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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
James Salter
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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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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.
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I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
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The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.
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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