American - Novelist | June 10, 1925 - June 19, 2015
There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.
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.
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Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.
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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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I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been doing.
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There is no situation like the open road, and seeing things completely afresh. I'm used to traveling. It's not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It's the curtain coming up on another act.
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There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
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It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.
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The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.
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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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Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
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I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it's disheartening; you don't want to go on. That's what I think is hard - the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done.
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