Quotes from J. D. Salinger

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.

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.

I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.

It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.

I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.

And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.

I can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood.

I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't you feel even worse.

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.

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible.

It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

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.

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.

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

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

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

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

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.