Top 100 J.D. Salinger Quotes
#1. I also say "Boy" a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and some times I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair.
J.D. Salinger
#2. That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat.
J.D. Salinger
#3. I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.
J.D. Salinger
#4. And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
J.D. Salinger
#5. If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.
J.D. Salinger
#6. But her arms were probably the best of her. They were brown and round and good.
J.D. Salinger
#7. Exactly what don't I think is beautiful? Listen, I don't care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God. Anything.
J.D. Salinger
#8. Some of them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes, the only place they'll still be floating will be inside my mind. That's quite interesting, because if you look at it a certain way, that's where they started floating in the first place.
J.D. Salinger
#9. Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest.
J.D. Salinger
#10. He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.
J.D. Salinger
#11. You give me a royal pain in the ass if you want to know the truth.
J.D. Salinger
#12. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
J.D. Salinger
#13. 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.
J.D. Salinger
#14. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains.
J.D. Salinger
#15. 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.
J.D. Salinger
#16. Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.
J.D. Salinger
#17. John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.
J.D. Salinger
#18. For a psychoanalyst to be any good ... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place.
J.D. Salinger
#19. Call up and say you were killed. Let go of that damn glass.
J.D. Salinger
#21. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
J.D. Salinger
#22. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.
J.D. Salinger
#23. This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.
J.D. Salinger
#25. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.
J.D. Salinger
#26. Once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you're going to start getting closer and closer - that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it - to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart.
J.D. Salinger
#27. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible, especially me.
J.D. Salinger
#28. 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.
J.D. Salinger
#30. Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.
J.D. Salinger
#31. There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.
J.D. Salinger
#32. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.
J.D. Salinger
#34. At least I'm still in love with Yorick's skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick's skull. I want an honorable goddam skull when I'm dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddam skull like Yorick's.
J.D. Salinger
#35. God, how I hate it when somebody yells "Good luck!" at me when I'm leaving somewhere. It's depressing.
J.D. Salinger
#36. Oh, I don't know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don't know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all.
J.D. Salinger
#37. My God, think of the opportunities and thrusts that lie ahead when one knows without a shred of doubt how commonplace and normal one is at heart!
J.D. Salinger
#38. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible.
J.D. Salinger
#39. It's just that if I'd had any guts at all, I wouldn't have gone back to college at all this year. I don't know. I mean it's all the most incredible farce.
J.D. Salinger
#40. You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.
J.D. Salinger
#41. You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favor. Just because they're crazy about themself, they think you're crazy about them, too, and that you're just dying to do them a favor. It's sort of funny, in a way.
J.D. Salinger
#43. He could hear me alright ... but he didn't answer me right away. He was the kind of guy that hates to answer you right away.
J.D. Salinger
#44. Then I started reading this timetable I had in my pocket. Just stop lying. Once I get started, I can go on for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. Hours.
J.D. Salinger
#45. It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.
J.D. Salinger
#46. It's the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn't mind taking out for a good academic run someday.
J.D. Salinger
#47. You know what she said? She says nobody gets a nervous breakdown just from the war and all. She says you probably were unstable like, your whole goddam life.
J.D. Salinger
#48. She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
J.D. Salinger
#49. < ... > However I have thought of you frequently and of the extremely pleasant afternoon we spent in each other's company on April 30, 1944 between 3:45 and 4:15 P. M. in case it slipped your mind.
J.D. Salinger
#50. I am not exactly wallowing in guilt at the moment, but guilt is guilt.It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified.
J.D. Salinger
#51. I said I thought she had a very fine voice.
She nodded. 'I know. I'm going to be a professional singer.'
'Really? Opera?'
'Heavens, no. I'm going to sing jazz on the radio and make heaps of money. Then, when I'm thirty, I shall retire and live on a ranch in Ohio.
J.D. Salinger
#52. If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.
J.D. Salinger
#53. I've survived a lot of things, and I'll probably survive this.
J.D. Salinger
#54. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.
J.D. Salinger
#55. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.
J.D. Salinger
#57. Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.
J.D. Salinger
#59. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.
J.D. Salinger
#60. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
J.D. Salinger
#62. He gave out a big yawn while he said that. Which is something that gives me a royal pain in the ass. I mean if somebody yawns right while they're asking you to do them a goddamn favor.
J.D. Salinger
#63. Listen, if you're not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.
J.D. Salinger
#64. I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don't know what to do with their invisible gifts.
J.D. Salinger
#65. It didn't exactly depress me to think about it, but it didn't make me feel gay as hell either. Certain things should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that's impossible, but its too bad anyways.
J.D. Salinger
#66. Mother, darling, don't yell at me. I can hear you beautifully," said the girl.
J.D. Salinger
#67. I'm no goddam animal. I may be a stupid, fouled-up twentieth-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don't gimme that. I'm no animal.
J.D. Salinger
#68. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains.
J.D. Salinger
#69. Naturally, I never told him I thought he was a terrific whistler. I mean you don't just go up to somebody and say, 'You're a terrific whistler.
J.D. Salinger
#70. You used to be such a swell kid," Bobby stated briefly.
"Oh! And I ain't no more?" Helen little-girl'd.
J.D. Salinger
#71. I don't like it when it stings,' he said. 'Nobody does.
J.D. Salinger
#72. You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
J.D. Salinger
#73. 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.
J.D. Salinger
#74. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it. People never notice anything.
J.D. Salinger
#76. Everybody in this family gets his goddamn religion in a different package.
J.D. Salinger
#77. I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do
J.D. Salinger
#79. If he didn't have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We'd never see out Zooey again.
J.D. Salinger
#80. 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.
J.D. Salinger
#81. I don't get hardly anything out of anything. I'm in bad shape. I'm in lousy shape.
J.D. Salinger
#82. He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable.
J.D. Salinger
#83. It isn't very serious, I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.
J.D. Salinger
#85. I've met the girl. She's a zero in my opinion but terrific-looking. I don't actually know that she's a zero. I mean she hardly said two words the night I met her. Just sat and smiled and smoked, so it isn't fair to say.
J.D. Salinger
#86. Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it.
J.D. Salinger
#88. Fortunately, I find that if a situation is funny or risible enough, I tend to bleed less profusely.
J.D. Salinger
#89. In New York, boy, money really talks - I'm not kidding.
J.D. Salinger
#90. If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did.
J.D. Salinger
#91. It ends up with everybody at this long dinner table laughing their asses off because the great Dane comes in with a bunch of puppies. Everybody thought it was a male , I suppose, or some goddam thing. All I can say is, don't see it if you don't want to puke all over yourself.
J.D. Salinger
#92. I don't care if it's a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it.
J.D. Salinger
#93. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.
J.D. Salinger
#94. It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.
J.D. Salinger
#95. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. - Holden Caulfield
J.D. Salinger
#96. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
J.D. Salinger
#97. What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in awhile.
J.D. Salinger
#98. New York is terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night.
J.D. Salinger
#100. On top of everything else," he said immediately, "we've got 'Wise Child' complexes. We've never really got off the goddam air. Not one of us. We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound. At least I do ... it's impossible for me to keep my mouth shut.
J.D. Salinger
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