J. D. Salinger Quotes

One of the reasons that I quit going to the theatre when I was about twenty was that I resented like hell filingout of the theatre because some playwright was forever slamming down his silly curtain.

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.

Poetry, surely, is a crisis, perhaps the only actionable one we can call our own.

For Esme-with Love and Squalor.

Never tell anyone anything. If you do you start missing everyone.

Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing that Jesus really would’ve liked would be the guy that plays the kettle drums in the orchestra.

The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they’ll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don’t like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they’ll say he’s conceited. Even smart girls do it.

Take most people, they’re crazy about cars… I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.

The trouble with me is, I always have to read that stuff by myself. If an actor reads it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he’s going to do something phoney every minute.

He looked like the kind of guy that wouldn’t talk to you much unless he wanted something off you. He had a lousy personality.

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.

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.