J. D. Salinger Quotes
-
I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.
-
She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.
-
We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.
-
Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.
-
Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.
-
I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't.
-
I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.
-
He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
-
After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.
-
He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff.
-
We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.
-
While I was walking I passed these two guys that were unloading this big Christmas tree off a truck. One guy, kept saying to the other guy, 'Hold the sonunvabitch up! Hold it up, for Chrissake!' It certainly was a gorgeous way to talk about a Christmas tree.
-
My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking.
-
A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.
-
You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of.
-
I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.
-
You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.
-
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me.
-
Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.
-
I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.
-
That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.
-
It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.
-
But what I mean is, lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most. I mean you can’t help it sometimes.
-
It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.