J.D. Salinger
Novelist
1919-01-01
Quotes by J.D. Salinger
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One of the few things left in the world, aside from the world itself, that sadden me every day is an awareness that you get upset if Boo Boo or Walt tells you you're saying something that sounds like me. You sort of take it as an accusation of piracy, a little slam at your individuality. Is it so bad that we sometimes sound like each other? The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose... For us, doesn't each of our individualities begin right at the point where we own up to our extremely close connections and accept the inevitability of borrowing one another's jokes, talents, idiocies?
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Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
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If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.
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I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.
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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.
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How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.
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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.
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It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.
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Some stories, my property, have been stolen. Someone's appropriated them. It's an illicit act. It's unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked, and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That's how I feel.
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Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
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I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
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He might have just been in a play that closed in Philadelphia. He might have been with a law firm.
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I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
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What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that writes it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
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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.
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If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly.
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She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.
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... there are no fools ...
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She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.
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My moustache, however sparse, was all mine; it hadn't been put on with spirit gum. I felt it reassuringly with my fingers as I hurried back to school.
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