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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.

James Salter

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James Salter
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More quotes by James Salter

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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
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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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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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Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.
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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You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.
James Salter
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You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer is lucky enough to still have a few books around after he's gone, a few that are still being read, then he's accomplished quite a lot.
James Salter
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Dresscodes are for styleless people.
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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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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ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
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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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.
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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Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
James Salter
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One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
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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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 like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.
James Salter