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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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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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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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 am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
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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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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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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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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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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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It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.
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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.
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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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Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).
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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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Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
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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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I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.