J.D. Salinger Quotes

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.

Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.

Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl.

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.

Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.

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.

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.

Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally.

Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?' Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.

I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.

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.

She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.

People never notice anything.

Some of my best friedns are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children.

Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies

I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.

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.

The little girl on the plane Who turned her doll's head around To look at me.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

The day I became press secretary to the President of the United States, I was in an entirely different world from the one I'd been in the day before.

You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.

Oh, this happiness is strong stuff.

Are all your stars shining?

There have not been children of comparable youth in the White House since the Kennedy era.

A funny thing happened on the way to the election - I got to the Senate first.

Jackie Kennedy was magnificent in the days and weeks immediately following her husband's assassination. She was especially wonderful to me.

Let's just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you.

On several occasions President Kennedy encouraged me to take a lover, an obvious sign he also had some himself.

A lot of people criticize the primaries, but I think they are absolutely essential to the education of the President of the United States.

It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.

But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.

I had been in so many towns and cities in America with John Kennedy, but I was not with him in Dallas, Texas, on November 21, 1963.

I told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course, but the thing is, I meant it when I said it. I'm crazy. I swear to God I am.

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.

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.

I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.

People always clap for the wrong reasons.

Onassis was a man who loved to walk, to walk and talk, and he was the kind of man who doesn't go to sleep at night-he talks and talks.

Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.

It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.

If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.

If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable.

If Bush wins, I'm going to leave the country and spend the rest of my life in France.

Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.

I am not very introspective.

I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. She knocked me out, though.