Top 100 J D Salinger Quotes
#1. I really began to love to read while in high school, and my favorite authors were my heroes: J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut.
Louis Sachar
#2. Had J.D. Salinger known who John Hinckley and mark David Chapman were before they bought his books or took them out of the library? Would it have mattered if he had? Had he returned the royalties he received from those purchases?
Adam Langer
#3. Beauties" by Anton Chekhov, "The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, "Brownies" or "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" both by ZZ Packer, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Fat" by Raymond Carver, "Indian Camp
Gabrielle Zevin
#4. Some days, being J.D. Salinger seems like a good idea.
Fred Smith
#5. Contrast J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and never goes beyond it; and so his novel, published for adults, is better appreciated by ten-year-olds. The
Ursula K. Le Guin
#6. I hit adolescence only to discover my autobiography had already been written; plagiarized, in fact, by a man named J.D. Salinger who, in appropriating to himself my inner mass of pain and confusion, had given me the unlikely name of Holden Caulfield.
Stephen Metcalf
#7. I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.'
John Krasinski
#8. His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]
Heather O'Neill
#9. I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.
Patricia Highsmith
#10. I was giving a speech one time, and the woman who introduced me said, 'Well, she used to be J. D. Salinger's girlfriend. I thought, 'God, is that all I've been?' I didn't want to be reduced to that.
Joyce Maynard
#11. J. D. Salinger, the greatly loved author who "had elected to silence himself. He had freedom of speech but what he had ended up wanting more than anything else, it seemed, was the freedom to be silent.
Michael Hofmann
#12. That's something that drives me crazy. When people say something twice that way, after you admit it the first time.
J.D. Salinger
#13. Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.
J.D. Salinger
#14. We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.
J.D. Salinger
#15. Lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most.
J.D. Salinger
#16. In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.
J.D. Salinger
#17. Seymour once said to me - in a crosstown bus, of all places - that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.
J.D. Salinger
#18. If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable.
J.D. Salinger
#19. He laughed and the others laughed with him, except Babe, who resented slightly that what he felt so deeply could be reduced to a humor.
J.D. Salinger
#20. I mean he was mostly a Year Book kind of handsome guy.
J.D. Salinger
#21. It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean, how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.
J.D. Salinger
#22. Think how practical, pleasant, and thrilling it would be if one could open one's mouth, from time to time, and something other than sheer, forward, unreliable opinion came out!
J.D. Salinger
#23. It would be quite a relief to rid my system of fustian this year.
J.D. Salinger
#24. He took two steps at a time, but slowly, holding onto the banister, putting his whole body into it, as if the act of climbing a flight of stairs was for him, as it is for many children, a moderately pleasurable end in itself.
J.D. Salinger
#25. People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am, I really do. But people never notice. People never notice anything.
J.D. Salinger
#26. 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
#27. I'm the one flunking out of this goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition.
J.D. Salinger
#28. That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the old foot down. If she's determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn't have it in peace.
J.D. Salinger
#29. For poise, I picked up a stone and threw it at a tree.
J.D. Salinger
#30. I don't even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it.
J.D. Salinger
#31. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself.
J.D. Salinger
#33. I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.
J.D. Salinger
#34. There isn't a nightclub in the world that you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you're with some girl that really knocks you out.
J.D. Salinger
#35. Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
- Holden Caulfield
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
#37. We're all animals,' he said. 'Basically, we're all animals.
J.D. Salinger
#38. Lane watched her for a moment with mounting irritation. Quite probably, he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating. In any case, he surely was concerned over the possibility that this bug Franny had might bitch up the whole weekend.
J.D. Salinger
#39. Hi,' he said. He always said it like he was terrifically bored or terrifically tired. He didn't want you to think he was visiting you or anything. He wanted you to think he'd come in by mistake, for God's sake.
J.D. Salinger
#40. Without the mind, sensuality quite has no organs to call her own!
J.D. Salinger
#41. He was the kind of phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question
J.D. Salinger
#42. His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like 'the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo.
J.D. Salinger
#43. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books.
J.D. Salinger
#44. 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
#45. When I'd originally loaded the car and held the door open for him, I'd had a passing impulse to pick him up bodily and insert him gently through the open window.
J.D. Salinger
#46. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
#47. Oh how nice!" the lady said. But not corny. She was just nice & all. "I must tell Ernest we met," she said. "May I ask your name, dear?"
"Rudolf Schmidt," I told her. I didn't feel like giving her my whole life history. Rudolf Schmidt was the name of the janitor of our dorm.
J.D. Salinger
#48. Every tune I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again.
J.D. Salinger
#49. Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat.
J.D. Salinger
#50. I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to.
J.D. Salinger
#51. I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.
J.D. Salinger
#53. I was feeling sort of lousy. Depressed and all. I almost wish I was dead.
J.D. Salinger
#54. And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
J.D. Salinger
#55. I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn't blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.
J.D. Salinger
#56. Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire.
J.D. Salinger
#57. 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
#58. I knew a lot of guys at Pencey I thought were a lot handsomer than Stradlater, but they wouldn't look handsome if you saw their pictures in the Year Book. They'd look like they had big noses or their ears stuck out.
J.D. Salinger
#59. But her arms were probably the best of her. They were brown and round and good.
J.D. Salinger
#60. New York's terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed.
J.D. Salinger
#61. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person, deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things.
J.D. Salinger
#62. Why's it so sunny?" she repeated.
Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said.
J.D. Salinger
#63. 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
#64. If you're supposed to sock somebody in the jaw, and you sort of feel like doing it, you should do it. I'm just no good at it, though. I'd rather push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an ax than sock him in the jaw.
J.D. Salinger
#65. I don't want to scare you," he said, "but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause.
J.D. Salinger
#66. Thirty-seven of them will be about shy, reclusive pennsylvania dutch lesbian who wants to write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect.
J.D. Salinger
#67. 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
#68. Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic.
J.D. Salinger
#69. Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest.
J.D. Salinger
#70. Jesus, life has its share of honorable thrills if one but keeps one's eyes open!
J.D. Salinger
#71. He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.
J.D. Salinger
#72. He was reading with his mouth open, and he didn't hear me walk across the porch and sit down on the railing opposite his chair.
I kicked his chair with the toe of my shoe. "Stop reading, Mac," I said. "Put down that book. Entertain me." He was reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
J.D. Salinger
#73. In a cruel manner of speaking, this young woman may well have lost her head before she was born; it is certainly not on her shoulders at this stage of the game.
J.D. Salinger
#74. It would not interfere with your being a nun. I live like an evil-minded monk myself.
J.D. Salinger
#75. You give me a royal pain in the ass if you want to know the truth.
J.D. Salinger
#76. Forgive the pessimism, if not the sonority. But I know how much you demand from a thing, you little bastard.
J.D. Salinger
#78. God, how I still love private readers. It's what we all used to be.
J.D. Salinger
#79. 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.
J.D. Salinger
#80. 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
#81. Where before we Comanches had simply stared at her femaleness, we now glared at it. She smiled back at us. It was a shade disconcerting. Then the Chief took over, revealing what had formerly been a well-concealed flair for incompetence.
J.D. Salinger
#82. Girls. You never know what they're going to think.
J.D. Salinger
#83. 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
#84. If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.
J.D. Salinger
#85. His date kept saying to him, "How horrible ... Don't, darling. Please, don't. Not here." Imagine giving somebody a feel and telling them about a guy committing suicide at the same time! They killed me.
J.D. Salinger
#86. Indeed, all forms of human folly and beastiality touch a very symphathetic chord within our breasts!
J.D. Salinger
#87. I go because I sit in judgment on every poor, ulcerous bastard I know. Which in itself doesn't bother me too much. At least, I judge straight from the colon when I judge, and I know that I'll pay like hell for any judgment I mete out, sooner or later, one way or another.
J.D. Salinger
#88. There is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful.
J.D. Salinger
#89. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains.
J.D. Salinger
#90. The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
J.D. Salinger
#91. 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
#92. He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in the god damn boat, he'd want to know who the guy that was rowing it before he'd even get in.
J.D. Salinger
#93. It's so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't mean they haven't done it.
J.D. Salinger
#94. I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway.
J.D. Salinger
#95. And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.
J.D. Salinger
#97. I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to see who was coughing.
J.D. Salinger
#98. Sometimes I talk a little loud when I get excited.
J.D. Salinger
#99. Our foyer has a funny smell that doesn't smell like anyplace else. I don't know what the hell it is. It isn't cauliflower and it isn't perfume - I don't know what the hell it is - but you always know you're home.
J.D. Salinger
#100. I still think that, in a way, I can't get past half my childhood dogmas.
J.D. Salinger
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