James Salter Quotes
Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.
Quotes to Explore
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The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
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If you can dream it, then you can achieve it. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
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To supply people for ages in camps makes no sense... you have to rebuild that cabana that they rent out to tourists on the weekend. They need help getting their fields repaired and their boats repaired.
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Hungary is, in a word, in a state of WAR against the Hapsburg dynasty, a war of legitimate defence, by which alone it can ever regain independence and freedom.
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I wake up at 5:30, 6 in the morning, but don't head into the office right away. I like to hang out with my wife, talk about things, get some coffee, you know.
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Women should wear clothing. Clothing shouldn't wear them.
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Basically, I get paid to be crazy. I get paid to believe I'm someone else, live in a completely false reality, and believe it's real. And that's a little scary. And I do it to the best of my ability. But it's kind of like swimming out to sea. You have to leave enough energy to swim back, and sometimes you get scared you swam too far.
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Near the end of my career, I saw things that didn't make too much sense to me when I was a kid.
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While day by day the overzealous student stores up facts for future use, he who has learned to trust nature finds need for ever fewer external directions. He will discard formula after formula, until he reaches the conclusion: Let nature take its course.
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I think that the good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.
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I was at 260 at Tennessee because I was playing three-technique.
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It's beneficial to play against your type; to be chameleon-like.
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
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Let us heed the voice of the people and recognize their common sense. If we do not, we not only blaspheme our political heritage, we ignore the common ties that bind all Americans.
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I'm scared of any fighter I've ever fought because they are some dangerous people to be dealing with. That's also where the anxiety comes from.
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My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.
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I looked for the same pitch my whole career, a breaking ball. All of the time. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.
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I always have one foot in the street, so I know not everyone wants to dress like the women they see in music videos.
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I'm no expert on American politics.
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To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
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Many of the environmentalists who moved into the environmental movement after Silent Spring ... detested pollution and craved purity. Absolute purity. They wanted to enforce zero tolerance on all environmental pollutants, not just on carcinogens. With friends like these the environment needs no enemies.
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I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.
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I've just always been interested in alter-naturalism and seeing if you can make real life interesting enough to be dramatic without enhancing it. Like, could you make a movie or write a play in which there's no compression of time, there's no enhanced event, it's just real life?
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Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.
