Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.
J. D. SALINGERListen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.
J. D. SALINGERPeople are always ruining things for you.
J. D. SALINGERWe 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.
J. D. SALINGERI’m up to my ears in unwritten words.
J. D. SALINGERI’m one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.
J. D. SALINGERThe mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
J. D. SALINGERIt’s not too bad when the sun’s out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
J. D. SALINGERDon’t hate me because I can’t remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else.
J. D. SALINGERGrand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.
J. D. SALINGERThat’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any.
J. D. SALINGERThe worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
J. D. SALINGERPeople always clap for the wrong reasons.
J. D. SALINGERMost stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.
J. D. SALINGERI 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.
J. D. SALINGERDo 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.
J. D. SALINGERA 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.
J. D. SALINGER