Top 100 Quotes About Salinger
#1. Although Salinger had long since cut me out of his life completely and made it plain that he had nothing but contempt for me, the thought of becoming the object of his wrath was more than I felt ready to take on.
Joyce Maynard
#2. DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger told Whit Burnett... that on D-Day he was carrying six chapters of 'The Catcher in the Rye', that he needed those pages with him not only as an amulet to help him survive but as a reason to survive.
Shane Salerno
#4. I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.
Regina Spektor
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.
David Lipsky
#8. [On The Catcher in the Rye] "This Salinger, he's a short story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it's too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should've cut out a lot about these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me. - James Stern
The New York Times
#9. 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
#10. Some days, being J.D. Salinger seems like a good idea.
Fred Smith
#11. With his ABC News experience, perhaps Pierre Salinger's next job could be cohosting-with Oliver Stone-a 24-hour Conspiracy Network.
Jonathan Alter
#12. 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
#13. Justin Salinger showed up one day with a pink cowboy hat on and everyone else got really annoyed because somehow he'd managed to get the pink cowboy hat.
Alex Cox
#14. 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
#15. I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.
John Dufresne
#16. 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
#17. Long after Salinger sent me away, I continued to believe his standards and expectations were the best ones.
Joyce Maynard
#18. His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]
Heather O'Neill
#19. From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.
Christopher Moore
#20. Salinger is a master of the memorable detail, the seemingly random gesture, the debris of mundane daily operations, the stuff that is left out of any analysis.
Bill Vaughan
#21. I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.
Patricia Highsmith
#22. I'm horrified to admit that I just love Salinger. I was devastated to find out that other people feel the same way.
Ethan Hawke
#23. I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?
Elizabeth Bishop
#24. Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.
Joyce Maynard
#25. Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger; I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.
Joyce Maynard
#26. 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
#27. Salinger, Plath, Toole, the literature of choice for the brooding outcast.
Rob Thomas
#28. A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.
Edward Abbey
#29. 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
#30. I am more than a little jealous that the wonder I am party to has been sprinkled over Salinger's gray head.
W.P. Kinsella
#31. That's something that drives me crazy. When people say something twice that way, after you admit it the first time.
J.D. Salinger
#32. Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.
J.D. Salinger
#33. We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.
J.D. Salinger
#34. 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
#35. In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.
J.D. Salinger
#36. 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
#37. If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable.
J.D. Salinger
#38. 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
#39. I mean he was mostly a Year Book kind of handsome guy.
J.D. Salinger
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. It would be quite a relief to rid my system of fustian this year.
J.D. Salinger
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. I'm the one flunking out of this goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition.
J.D. Salinger
#47. 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
#48. For poise, I picked up a stone and threw it at a tree.
J.D. Salinger
#49. I don't even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it.
J.D. Salinger
#50. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself.
J.D. Salinger
#52. I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.
J.D. Salinger
#53. 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
#54. Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
- Holden Caulfield
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
#56. We're all animals,' he said. 'Basically, we're all animals.
J.D. Salinger
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Without the mind, sensuality quite has no organs to call her own!
J.D. Salinger
#60. He was the kind of phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question
J.D. Salinger
#61. 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
#62. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books.
J.D. Salinger
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat.
J.D. Salinger
#69. 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
#70. I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.
J.D. Salinger
#72. I was feeling sort of lousy. Depressed and all. I almost wish I was dead.
J.D. Salinger
#73. And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
J.D. Salinger
#74. 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
#75. Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire.
J.D. Salinger
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. But her arms were probably the best of her. They were brown and round and good.
J.D. Salinger
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic.
J.D. Salinger
#88. Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest.
J.D. Salinger
#89. Jesus, life has its share of honorable thrills if one but keeps one's eyes open!
J.D. Salinger
#90. He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.
J.D. Salinger
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. I'm just like any other person you can meet and greet on the street and like or not like. I'm not Holden or Humbert. You can really touch me! If you don't believe me, come to Aristod right now. Come hold and hump me!
Brian Celio
#94. America Held Hostage won 24 Emmys for ABC News, but someone forgot to include my name on the list of people responsible for the show.
Pierre Salinger
#95. It would not interfere with your being a nun. I live like an evil-minded monk myself.
J.D. Salinger
#96. You give me a royal pain in the ass if you want to know the truth.
J.D. Salinger
#97. Forgive the pessimism, if not the sonority. But I know how much you demand from a thing, you little bastard.
J.D. Salinger
#99. God, how I still love private readers. It's what we all used to be.
J.D. Salinger
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
