Salinger Writing Quotes & Sayings

I privately say to you old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parenthesis: (((( )))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off as bow-legged
buckle-legged
omens of my state of mind and body at this writing. — J.D. Salinger

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 am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I'll watch for that book. — J.D. Salinger

There's truth in every religion I, I, Christians believe there's truth in every religion. But we just believe there is one saviour. We believe we can learn truth from, I believe I've have learned a lot of truth from different religions. Because they all have a portion of the truth. I just believe there's one saviour Jesus Christ. — Rick Warren

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

Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? — J.D. Salinger

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason ... Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You're a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I'm feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I'd give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart. — J.D. Salinger

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. — J.D. Salinger

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s. — Garrett Hedlund

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. — Maya Angelou

Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates. — Henry David Thoreau

What would you call them in English?" She thought about it for a moment. "Canadians, — Rick Riordan

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. — J.D. Salinger

Love isn't about deserving. It's simply love. — Christine Lindsay

Everybody is different. Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn't mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it's just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time. — Billy Joel

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible. — J.D. Salinger

It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind. — David Lodge

A great actor is simply just seeing him or herself, and reacting to what exists around them. — Shailene Woodley

I can tell you if you look at the polls, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, they do not think we should increase the debt limit. — Jim DeMint

At a tiny station in New Albany, Indiana, which is right across from the river from Louisville, Kentucky, where I grew up. The Louisville stations were loath to hire beginners, so I had to go across the river. — Bob Edwards

A world I dream where black or white, whatever race you be, will share the bounties of the earth and every man is free — Langston Hughes

I have enormous respect for Tom Daschle. The NRA has not yet taken a formal position on which I'm aware of on this matter, and I think Tom may be just getting a little ahead of things. — John Dingell

For about a whole month, at least, whenever anybody said anything that sounded campusy or phony, or that smelled to high heaven of ego or something like that, I at least kept quiet about it. I went to the movies or I stayed in the library all hours or I started writing papers like made on Restoration Comedy and stuff like that - but at least I had the pleasure of not hearing my own voice for a while. — J.D. Salinger

I love movies. And I dig a great love story: the kind that wrecks me, then builds me back up and leaves me inspired. I write what I want to see. — Gina Prince-Bythewood

If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined. — J.D. Salinger

Ruggles disliked Christopher Tietjens with the inveterate dislike of the man who revels in gossip for the man who never gossips. — Ford Madox Ford

[Vik] Okay, I'll drop the subject. But if you ever do that to me again, I'll stab you in the penis, which I'm sure will hurt."

[Syn] "Yeah, it would."

[Vik] "Good. Now I'm powering down for a bit to conserve my power. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it. — J.D. Salinger

Why do ever think about to get married??
Do we dare, all life to get worried, to be curious, to be angry, to think for money like they are gold, to think about what next to buy, to cry and even and more to happen?
Marriage is like the gold, you find it or not, it depends from you but you once lost you can't find the same gold or the same wife, it's in about of luck to find the same. Imaginate that you have gold, but you don't have money, so you go to a pawnshop and what happens the gold becomes money, but reality you have two diffirent stuff. This doesn't mean that by doing that you get the same, why don't you go and give your wife for other person??? Will be the same like your wife will live in this person for which you have replaced her??
Of course, NOT! — Deyth Banger

Do not listen to those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious. — Og Mandino