An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.
J. D. SALINGERHe said you were the only one who was bitter about S’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.
More J. D. Salinger Quotes
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Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.
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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.
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If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.
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People always clap for the wrong reasons.
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I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
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I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
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I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.
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Nobody who’s really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies.
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We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.
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You don’t know how to talk to people you don’t like. Don’t love, really. You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.
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You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.
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The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
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She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
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Did you ever get fed up?’ I said. ‘I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?
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Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.
J. D. SALINGER