is he crazy?" --Harcourt-Brace editor on Holden Caulfield

Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.

Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve. I was once described by my own son Stephen as an emotional ostrich.

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

A heart is all that didn't get removed.

The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer.

And the night shall be filled with music And the cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents like the Arabs And as silently steal away.

We should let our godliness exhale like th odor of flowers. We should live for the good of our kind, and strive for the salvation of the world.

If something bothers me, it bothers me for a long time until I find a way to work it out. Music provided me with a means of working things out.

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

Don't set your goals too low. If you don't need much, you won't become much.

Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.

I don’t want money. What the hell’s money good for? You can’t drive it and you can’t eat it and it won’t even fix a flat.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting.