Salinger Quotes

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

“His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]”

“I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.”

“I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of trying to make me happy”

“I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in."Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though..."What the hellya reading?""Goddamn book."He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the name on it. "Any good?" he said."This sentence I'm reading is terrific.”

“As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.”

“If you're not inthe mood, you can't do that stuff right.”

“I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something.”

“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.”

“Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”