J. D. Salinger Quotes
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I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
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If you weren't around, I'd probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddamn place. You're the only reason I'm around, practically.
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The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
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Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.
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I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.
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Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.
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I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself.
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I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
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Life is a gift horse in my opinion.
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I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
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I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.
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If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.
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I was not only twenty-three, but a conspicuously retarded twenty-three.
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Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.
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There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.
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You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac — with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.
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I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. Not you.
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Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable.
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Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
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Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).
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He wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes - fools, no.
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Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
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Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.