J. D. Salinger Quotes

Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

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

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

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

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

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

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them"”if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

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, if you want to know the truth.

Mothers are all slightly insane.