J. D. Salinger Quotes

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J. D. Salinger

Profession : Novelist

Birth : January 1, 1919

I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.

J. D. Salinger

I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

J. D. Salinger

I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

J. D. Salinger

Mothers are all slightly insane.

J. D. Salinger

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. 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.

J. D. Salinger

I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in 'The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf, out of their reach.

J. D. Salinger

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

J. D. Salinger

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

J. D. Salinger

There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.

J. D. Salinger

How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.

J. D. Salinger

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.

J. D. Salinger

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

J. D. Salinger

I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

J. D. Salinger

I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.

J. D. Salinger

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

J. D. Salinger

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

J. D. Salinger

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

J. D. Salinger

You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.

J. D. Salinger

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

J. D. Salinger

He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

J. D. Salinger