J. D. Salinger Quotes
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All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
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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's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.
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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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There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.
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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
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He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.
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Mothers are all slightly insane.
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Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
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They didn't act like people and they didn't act like actors. It's hard to explain. They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and all. I mean they were good, but they were too good.
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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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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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Zooey said... It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.
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Some stories, my property, have been stolen. Someone's appropriated them. It's an illicit act. It's unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked, and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That's how I feel.
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It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.
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It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.
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For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world - not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things - work out rather beautifully.
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Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules. - Mr. Spencer
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It naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person - the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist - who can write a poem that is a poem.
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An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.