Quotes & Sayings About Salinger

Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I think people are plotting to make me happy. — J.D. Salinger

So long, crumb-bum. — J.D. Salinger

I thought you told me Jimmy Jimmereeeno was run over and killed."
"What?"
"You heard me," Eloise said. "Why are you sleeping way over here?"
"Because," said Ramona.
"Because why? Ramona, I don't feel like
"
"Because I don't want to hurt Mickey."
"Who?"
"Mickey," said Ramona, rubbing her nose. "Mickey Mickeranno. — J.D. Salinger

Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest. — J.D. Salinger

Answer Professor Mandell's letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily "Stop that!" Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides. — J.D. Salinger

I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't. — J.D. Salinger

I'm no goddam animal. I may be a stupid, fouled-up twentieth-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don't gimme that. I'm no animal. — J.D. Salinger

I feel like someone in a terribly sophisticated play. The funny part is, I'm not sophisticated. I'm not anything. I'm just me. — J.D. Salinger

Whole generations have forgotten history. — Pierre Salinger

God, I wish you could have been there. — J.D. Salinger

I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. — J.D. Salinger

Not a lot of contemporary fiction is written about brothers and sisters. Salinger's Franny and Zooey was an inspiration for me. In Franny and Zooey, the sister gets in trouble and the brother comes to help her out. But I wanted to make sure that in my novel the sister had more to do than lie around on a sofa muttering, which is what Franny does for two-thirds of Salinger's novel. — K.M. Soehnlein

You know Sven? The man who takes care of the gym?' he asked. He waited till he got a nod from Nicholson. 'Well, if Sven dreamed tonight that his dog died, he'd have a very, very bad night's sleep, because he's very fond of that dog. But when he woke up in the morning, everything would be all right. He'd know it was only a dream.'
Nicholson nodded. 'What's the point exactly?'
The point is if his dog really died, it would be exactly the same thing. Only he wouldn't know it. I mean he wouldn't wake up till he died himself. — J.D. Salinger

Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals. — Joyce Maynard

He was little more than halfway down the staircase when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream
clearly coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiled walls. — J.D. Salinger

Eight dollars and eighty-five cents. Sixty-five cents. I spent some. — J.D. Salinger

She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn't as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth. — J.D. Salinger

Some days, being J.D. Salinger seems like a good idea. — Fred Smith

I was surrounded by phonies ... They were coming in the goddam window. — J.D. Salinger

Jesus, life has its share of honorable thrills if one but keeps one's eyes open! — J.D. Salinger

Lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. — J.D. Salinger

Just get sick sometime and go visit yourself, and you'll find out how tactless you are! — J.D. Salinger

He looked at me with his eyes shining - yes, shining. The boy's eyes could shine. — J.D. Salinger

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

Beauties" by Anton Chekhov, "The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, "Brownies" or "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" both by ZZ Packer, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Fat" by Raymond Carver, "Indian Camp — Gabrielle Zevin

But I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one. I think that if he titters at male writers who wear invisible skirts he does so at his eternal peril. I'll say no more on the subject. This is precisely the sort of confidence that can be easily and juicily Abused. — J.D. Salinger

She doesn't like her own room because it's too little, she says. She says she likes to spread out. That kills me. What's old Phoebe got to spread out? Nothing. — J.D. Salinger

Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage. — J.D. Salinger

Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. - Holden Caulfield — J.D. Salinger

I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting. — J.D. Salinger

I don't hate too many guys. What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert Ackley. I hate them once in a while - I admit it - but it doesn't last too long, is what I mean. After a while, if I didn't see them, if they didn't come in the room, or if I didn't see them in the dining room for a couple of meals, I sort of missed them. I mean I sort of missed them. — J.D. Salinger

They gave Sally this little blue butt-twitcher of a dress to wear. She really did look damn good in it, though. I have to admit it. And don't think she didn't know it. She kept walking ahead of me, so that I'd see how cute her little ass looked. It did look pretty cute, too. I hate to admit it. — J.D. Salinger

All we do our entire lives is go to one piece of holy ground to another — J.D. Salinger

On top of everything else," he said immediately, "we've got 'Wise Child' complexes. We've never really got off the goddam air. Not one of us. We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound. At least I do ... it's impossible for me to keep my mouth shut. — J.D. Salinger

This fall I think you're riding for - it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. — J.D. Salinger

I don't like any shows very much, if you want to know the truth. They're not as bad as movies, but they're certainly nothing to rave about. In the first place, I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do. Some of the good ones do, in a very slight way, but it's not in a way that's fun to watch. And if the actor's really good, you can always tell he knows he's good, and that spoils it. — J.D. Salinger

Tell you what we'll do," she said. "We'll drive to town and get some pickles, and some bread, and we'll eat the pickles in the car, and then we'll go to the station and get Daddy, and then we'll bring Daddy home and make him take us for a ride in the boat. You'll have to help him carry the sails down. O.K.? — J.D. Salinger

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people ... Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. — J.D. Salinger

I never bore people I haven't known for at least a thousand years. — J.D. Salinger

This is God's universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't. — J.D. Salinger

I got the idea in my head - and I could not get it out - that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? I think that knowledge - when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway - is the worst of all. The least excusable certainly. I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while - just once in a while - there was some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! — J.D. Salinger

And I like his conceit. He's so conceited he's actually humble, the crazy bastard. — J.D. Salinger

Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence and beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls. — J.D. Salinger

I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school. — J.D. Salinger

The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding — J.D. Salinger

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal. — J.D. Salinger

You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live. — J.D. Salinger

We 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. Salinger

You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world. — J.D. Salinger

That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think. — J.D. Salinger

Don't tell people what you are thinking, or you will miss them terribly when you are away. — J.D. Salinger

There were half circles under her eyes and other, subtler signs that mark an acutely troubled young girl, but nonetheless no one could have missed seeing that she was first-class beauty. — J.D. Salinger

He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were. — J.D. Salinger

Finally, though, I'd leave the room without even taking a sock at him. I'd probably go down to the can and sneak a cigarette and watch myself getting tough in the mirror. Anyway, that's what I thought about the whole way back to the hotel. It's no fun to be yellow. Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. i think maybe I'm just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn't give much of a damn if they lose their gloves. — J.D. Salinger

It's so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't mean they haven't done it. — J.D. Salinger

I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible, especially me. — J.D. Salinger

Zui-Gan called out to himself every way, "Master."
Then he answered himself, "Yes, sir."
And then he added, "Become sober."
Again he answered, "Yes, sir."
"And after that," he continued, "do not be deceived by others."
"Yes, sir; yes, sir," he replied. -Mu-Mon-Kwan. — J.D. Salinger

You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. It's staggering how you jump straight the hell into the heart of a matter. I'm goosebumps all over ... By God, you inspire me. You inflame me, Bessie. You know what you've done? Do you realize what you've done? You've given this whole goddam issue a fresh, new, Biblical slant. I wrote four papers in college on the Crucifixion - five, really - and every one of them worried me half crazy because I thought something was missing. Now I know what it was. Now it's clear to me. I see Christ in an entirely different light. His unhealthy fanaticism. His rudeness to those nice, sane, conservative, tax-paying Pharisees. Oh, this is exciting! In your simple, straightforward bigoted way, Bessie, you've sounded the missing keynote of the whole New Testament. Improper diet. Christ lived on cheeseburgers and Cokes. For all we know he probably fed the mult - — J.D. Salinger

I can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood. — J.D. Salinger

When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice - twice - we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner - everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wished he wasn't there. — J.D. Salinger

I like to chew candles. — J.D. Salinger

Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed. — J.D. Salinger

What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. — J.D. Salinger

America Held Hostage won 24 Emmys for ABC News, but someone forgot to include my name on the list of people responsible for the show. — Pierre Salinger

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on. — J.D. Salinger

I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not. — J.D. Salinger

Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat. — J.D. Salinger

The funny part is, I felt like marrying her the minute I saw her. I'm crazy. I didn't even like her much, and yet all of a sudden I felt like I was in love with her and wanted to marry her. I swear to God I'm crazy. I admit it. — J.D. Salinger

I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something. — J.D. Salinger

I am not constructed for continued absences; I have never claimed to be constructed for them. — J.D. Salinger

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction. — Bob Shacochis

While the consequences are often quite hellish, I am absolutely and perhaps permanently against ignoring books recommended from the heart by very nice people and strangers; it is too risky and inhuman; also the consequences are often painful in a fairly charming way. — J.D. Salinger

Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy. — J.D. Salinger

I'm just like any other person you can meet and greet on the street and like or not like. I'm not Holden or Humbert. You can really touch me! If you don't believe me, come to Aristod right now. Come hold and hump me! — Brian Celio

I've had at least my share of tragedy, but I have had far more than my share of happiness. — Pierre Salinger

Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell. — J.D. Salinger

Then again you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' — J.D. Salinger

And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is begining to drive me out of my seat. (Buddy) — J.D. Salinger

Look at 'em,' he said. 'Goddam fools.' 'Who?' said Ginnie. 'I don't know. Anybody. — J.D. Salinger

People are always ruining things for you. — J.D. Salinger

I know this much, is all," Franny said. "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there. — J.D. Salinger

People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it. — J.D. Salinger

New York's terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed. — J.D. Salinger

Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?'
Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married. — J.D. Salinger

He said he was - this is exactly what he said - he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading 'Dombey and Son', and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you - that's exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he's perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff! I could just spit! I could! It's like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something ... — J.D. Salinger

Mothers are all slightly insane. — J.D. Salinger

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 was feeling sort of lousy. Depressed and all. I almost wish I was dead. — J.D. Salinger

This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts. — J.D. Salinger

Oh, this happiness is strong stuff. It's marvelously liberating. — J.D. Salinger

So what do you think?' He asked, holding up the book.
'I think Salinger is a closet paedophile,' I replied placidly and was surprised and comforted by this minuscule, acidic, bitter Sylvia Plath like mocking, sniping tone that had crept into my voice. 'The main character Seymour is a fully grown man and a pervert who befriends young girls with his storytelling and swimming, just to get close enough to groom them in preparation for the inevitable sexual assault he lusts after. You might have noticed for example in A Perfect Day For Bananafish he grabs the young girls-'
'Sybil.'
'He grabs Sybil's ankles while lying on the beach and again when he pushes her in the water,' I continued. 'He goes too far when he kisses the bottom of her foot which makes even a four-year-old yell out in fear, knowing a line had been crossed. Frustrated Seymour walks away and goes back to his hotel where he kills himself in shame. — J.D. Gallagher

He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron — Jerome Salinger

The Great Gatsby' [ ... ] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [ ... ] — J.D. Salinger

My big trouble is, I always sort of think whoever I'm necking is a pretty intelligent person. It hasn't got a goddam thing to do with it, but I keep thinking it anyway. — J.D. Salinger

I took her dress over to the closet and hung it up. It was funny. It made me feel sort of sad when I hung it up. I thought of her going in a store and buying it, and nobody in the store knowing she was a prostitute and all. The salesman probably just thought she was a regular girl when she bought it. It made me feel sad as hell- I don't know why exactly. — J.D. Salinger

People never notice anything. — J.D. Salinger

His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them — J.D. Salinger

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck. — J.D. Salinger

If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable. — J.D. Salinger

This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don't mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one. — J.D. Salinger