Quotes About Salinger

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.

Believe me, as one who has seen a number of international crises firsthand, they cannot be handled without an understanding of history.

It feels like Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye in a day, and that incredible feeling of ease inspires writing. Inspires the pursuit of voice. Not his voice. My voice. Your voice.

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.

I am more than a little jealous that the wonder I am party to has been sprinkled over Salinger's gray head.

Salinger, unlike Disney, came from a well-to-do family, but he stands alongside Mickey's inventor as perhaps the second great body of water that feeds all Twee streams, rivers, estuaries, and ponds. His influence on the aesthetic is equally vast, his body of work virtual Twee scripture.

I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.'

I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?

I'm horrified to admit that I just love Salinger. I was devastated to find out that other people feel the same way.

I go over the mistake in my head a dozen times a day. How I was hiding in a closet upstairs at the Salinger house. How I had to pee but couldn't leave. So I pissed in a mug—a ceramic mug—and I put the mug down on the hardwood floor of the closet. I ran when I had the chance, and there is no way around it: I forgot the mug.

Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.

I kept waiting to fall in love with Salinger's cramped, desultory writing until I was annoyed.

Long after Salinger sent me away, I continued to believe his standards and expectations were the best ones.

In the Glass family stories, the mother is portrayed as hungry for her son's correspondence and news. She is portrayed as insatiable for this, in fact, and for this reason her son Zooey is in a constant state of mortified retreat. This theme plays itself out in many of Salinger's stories, the reticent brother and son who doesn't keep in touch.

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.

Sure. Martinis. We can pretend we're Salinger characters.

Like most of Salinger's characters, she wouldn't be such a fuckup, you felt, if these fucked-up things didn't keep happening to her. ... We believe in the wrong things, I wrote, using the same pen Boomer had used on his arm. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

I am more than a little jealous that the wonder I am party to has been sprinkled over Salinger's gray head.

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.

With his ABC News experience, perhaps Pierre Salinger's next job could be cohosting-with Oliver Stone-a 24-hour Conspiracy Network.

Lovecraft, the anti-Semite, was briefly married to a Jew. Salinger, the Jew, was once married to a Nazi.