Quotes from J. D. Salinger

I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

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

Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.

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.

Give me an honest con man any day.

There are still a few men who love desperately.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac — with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

Money always ends up making you blue.

But you can't always tell - with somebody's mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.

I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door.

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.

I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

I told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course, but the thing is, I meant it when I said it. I'm crazy. I swear to God I am.

For a psychoanalyst to be any good... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place.

But don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God.

He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff.

God, I wish you could have been there.

That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman.

My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking.

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

Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy- he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it.