J.D. Salinger Quotes

That's something that annoys the hell out of me- I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't

Some stories, my property, have been stolen. Someone's appropriated them. It's an illicit act. It's unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked, and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That's how I feel.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

I began writing eight or ten words of my own on a sheet of paper, in very large letters that I could read without any trouble. I did that for over a month, filling a couple of small, dime-store writing tablets. Then suddenly I quit. For no particular reason. Chiefly, I was saddened by my own ignorance, I think. Then, too, I was a little afraid I was going blind. There's never just one reason for anything. But, anyway, I quit.

It's history. It's poetry.

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.

However contradictory the coroner's report - whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death - isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

When I take my hand out of this blanket," he thought, "my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean. My body will be clean. I'll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt. A blue polka-dot tie. A gray suit with a stripe, and I'll be home, and I'll bolt the door. I'll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I'll bolt the door. I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door. I'll open the window, I'll let in a nice, quiet girl
not Frances, not anyone I've ever known
and I'll bolt the door. I'll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me
that one about being chartless
and I'll ask her to read some William Blake to me
that one about the little lamb that made thee
and I'll bolt the door. She'll have an American voice, and she won't ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I'll bolt the door.

The Great Gatsby' [ ... ] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [ ... ]

What was left of his fortune, the Laughing Man converted into diamonds, which he lowered casually, in emerald vaults, into the Black Sea. His personal wants were few. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagle's blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet.

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.

It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'Its a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business ofice, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer.

Years ago, in my earliest and pastiest days as a would-be writer, I once read a new story aloud to S. and Boo Boo. When I was finished, Boo Boo said flatly (but looking over at Seymour) that the story was "too clever." S. shook his head, beaming away at me, and said cleverness was my permanent affliction, my wooden leg, and that it was in the worst possible taste to draw the group's attention to it. As one limping man to another, old Zooey, let's be courteous and kind to each other.

- and poetry, surely, is a crisis.

I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It's not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and your adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?

I've been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like 'This one is wonderfully constructed,' and 'The conversation between the two cops is terrific.' So I'm hedging. I'm not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don't you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn't that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn't sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgement. It worries me enough. But I'm also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you.

He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.

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

You're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there.

I make everybody feel that he doesn't really want to do any good work but that he just wants to get work done that will be thought good by everyone he knows ...

I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. -Holden Caulfield

I cut going there entirely, gradually.

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!

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.

Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game all right – I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it?

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

A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that's about all.

Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.

The one that sang, old Janine, was always whispering into the g***** microphone before she sang. She'd say, 'And now we like to geeve you our impression of Vooly Voo Fransay. Eet ees the story of leetle Fransh girl who comes to a beeg ceety, just like New York, and falls een love wees a leetle boy from Brookleen. We hope you like eet.' Then, when she was all done whispering and being cute as hell, she'd sing some dopey song, half in English and half in French, and drive all the phonies in the place mad with joy.

I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake
especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.

Finally, though, I'd leave the room without even taking a sock at him. I'd probably go down to the can and sneak a cigarette and watch myself getting tough in the mirror. Anyway, that's what I thought about the whole way back to the hotel. It's no fun to be yellow. Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. i think maybe I'm just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn't give much of a damn if they lose their gloves.

I'm sick to death of being the heavy in everybody's life.

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.

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.

It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl - somebody in my dorm, for example, - he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know, not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making.
And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.

He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff.

This is God's universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't.

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.

He started to apologize for the fact that there were no chairs in his son's room
only floor cushions
but I quickly gave him to believe that for me this was little short of a godsend. (In fact, I think I said I hated chairs. I was so nervous that if he had informed me that his son's room was flooded, night and day, with a foot of water, I probably would have let out a little cry of pleasure. I probably would have said I had a rare foot disease, one that required my keeping my feet wet eight hours daily.)

Look at 'em,' he said. 'Goddam fools.' 'Who?' said Ginnie. 'I don't know. Anybody.

What're you majoring in?" I asked him. "Perverts?" I was only horsing around. "What're you trying to be
funny?

I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen

You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddamn sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddamn phenomenal world. {...} I used to worry about that. I don't worry about it very much any more. 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 goddamn skull when I'm dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddamn skull like Yorick's.

Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.

That's depressing, when somebody says "please" to you.

I don't even like old cars. I mean, they don't even interest me at all. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human

Am I very late?" she asked the Chief, smiling at him. She might just as well have asked if she was ugly. "No!" the Chief said.

The catcher in the rye ... that's all I really want to be ...

He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism ...

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.

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.

And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is begining to drive me out of my seat. (Buddy)

Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest.

Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.

Once, at one of the very rare and savory moments when my own teammates grudgingly allowed me to take the ball around one of the ends, Seymour, playing for the opposite side, disconcerted me by looking overjoyed to see me as I charged in his direction, as though it were an unexpected, an enormously providential chance encounter. I stopped almost dead short, and someone, of course, brought me down, in neighborhood talk, like a ton of bricks.

Yes, I have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer's a goddam spy.

Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.

Every time you mention some guy that's strictly a bastard - very mean, or very conceited and all - and when you mention it to the girl, she'll tell you he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he has, but that still doesn't keep him from being a bastard, in my opinion.

I'm the one flunking out of this goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition.

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. 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. If you don't you feel even worse.

For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he'd have to be a pretty peculiar type. I don't know. 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. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he wasn't run over by a goddam truck before he ever got his license to practice. He'd have to believe that it's through the grace of God that he has the native intelligence to be able to help his goddam patients at all. I don't know any good analysts who think along those lines. But that's the only kind of psychoanalyst who might be able to do Franny any good at all. If she got somebody terribly Freudian, or terribly eclectic, or just terribly run-of-the-mill - somebody who didn't even have any crazy, mysterious gratitude for his insight and intelligence - she'd come out of analysis in even worse shape.

You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.

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.

It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.

I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life.

I have scars on my hand from touching certain people. Once, in the park, when Frannie was still in the carriage, I put my hand on the downy pate of her head and left it there too long. Another time, at Loew's Seventy-second Street, with Zooey during a spooky movie. He was about six or seven, and he went under the seat to avoid watching a scary scene. I put my hand on his head. Certain heads, certain colors and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

He finished combing his goddamn gorgeous hair.

I'm sorry, I'm awful, I've just felt so terribly destructive all week. It's awful. I'm horrible.

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.

What gets me about D.B., though, he hated the war so much, and yet he got me to read this book A Farewell to Arms last summer. He said it was so terrific. That's what I can't understand. It had this guy in it named Lieutenant Henry that was supposed to be a nice guy and all. I don't see how D.B. could hate the Army and war and all so much and still like a phony like that. I mean, for instance, I don't see how he could like a phony like that and still like that one by Ring Lardner, or that other one he's so crazy about, The Great Gatsby. D.B. got sore when I said that, and said I was too young and all to appreciate it, but I don't think so. I told him I liked Ring Lardner and The Great Gatsby and all. I did, too. I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.

It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all-I'm not saying that-but they're also touchy as hell.

-Ех, как ми се иска да се ожениш!- възкликна ненадейно майка му със замечтан глас.
Всички в семейството – ясно, че и Зуи – познаваха склонността на госпожа Глас към нелогични изказвания. Тя се развихряше най-силно и най-величествено насред точно такива бурни, емоционални пререкания. Обаче този път свари Зуи неподготвен. Той издаде експлозивен звук, най-вече през носа – беше или смях, или точно обратното на смеха. Госпожа Глас се наведе бързо и тревожно напред, за да разбере какво е. Беше по-скоро смях и тя се облегна назад с облекчение.
-Ами иска ми се! – настоя тя. – Защо не се ожениш?
Зуи се поотпусна, извади сгъната ленена кърпичка от джоба на панталона си, разгъна я със замах и се изсекна в нея веднъж, два, три пъти. Прибра кърпичката и каза:
-Много обичам да пътувам с влак. Ожениш ли се, не можеш вече да се вредиш да седнеш до прозореца.
-Що за причина!
-Идеална причина е. Махай се, Беси. Остави ме на мира тук.

"I wish you'd get married," Mrs. Glass said, abruptly, wistfully. '
Everyone in the Glass family-Zooey certainly not last was familiar with this sort of non-sequitur from Mrs. Glass. It bloomed best, most sublimely, in the middle of an emotional flareup of just this kind. This time, it caught Zooey very much off guard, however. He gave an explosive sound, mostly through the nose, of either laughter or the opposite of laughter. Mrs. Glass quickly and anxiously leaned forward to see which it was. It was laughter, more

I packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I spent the next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened, investigating that most interesting of all summer-active animals, the American Girl in Shorts.

Her sample drawings were clipped, rather subordinately, to her photograph. All of them were arresting. One of them was unforgettable. The unforgettable one was done in florid wash colors, with a caption that read: 'Forgive Them Their Trespasses.' It showed three small boys fishing in an odd-looking body of water, one of their jackets draped over a 'No Fishing!' sign. The tallest boy, in the foreground of the picture, appeared to have rickets in one leg and elephantiasis in the other--an effect, it was clear, that Miss Kramer had deliberately used to show that the boy was standing with his feet slightly apart.

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.

It makes me so depressed I go crazy.

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.

Men bore me;
Women abhor me;
Children floor me;
Society stinks

I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at all glad I met.

When it became clear that nothing of the kind was forthcoming, I took more direct action. I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone - a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
- De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952)

I don't get hardly anything out of anything. I'm in bad shape. I'm in lousy shape.

Imagine the story you would most want to read, and then shamelessly write it.

I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

People are always ruining things for you.

I went down by a different staircase, and i saw another "fuck you" on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn't come off. It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "fuck you" signs in the world.

God, how I still love private readers. It's what we all used to be.

He said he was - this is exactly what he said - he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading 'Dombey and Son', and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you - that's exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he's perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff! I could just spit! I could! It's like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something ...

Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them. It was really nice sightseeing, if you know what I mean. In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring - But I have to be careful about that. I mean about calling certain guys bores. I don't understand boring guys. I really don't.

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.

It isn't very serious, I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.

I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school.

Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.

There's a marvelous peace in not publishing, there's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself.

They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn't funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things.

This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.