Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “That’s the terrible part. I swear to God I’m a madman.”

— J.D. Salinger

302. “It’s full of phonies and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a golden Cadillac...”

— J.D. Salinger

303. “I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.”

— J.D. Salinger

304. “I didn’t feel like it. You really have to be in the mood for that stuff.”

— J.D. Salinger

305. “We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.”

— J.D. Salinger

306. “You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.”

— J.D. Salinger

307. “It was a terrible school, no matter how you looked at it.”

— J.D. Salinger

308. “Then a funny thing happened. When I got to the museum, all of a sudden I wouldn’t have gone inside for a million bucks. It just didn’t appeal to me – and here I’d walked through the whole goddam park and looked forward to it and all. If Phoebe’d been there, I probably would have, but she wasn’t. So all I did, in front of the museum, was get a cab and go down to the Biltmore. I didn’t feel much like going. I’d made that damn date with Sally, though.”

— J.D. Salinger

309. “Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

311. “I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they’re only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.”

— J.D. Salinger

Featured in: Romance Quotes

312. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

313. “Maybe I just worried too much about things. Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance. I don’t know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.”

— J.D. Salinger

314. “Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.”

— J.D. Salinger

315. “The thing he was afraid of, he was afraid somebody’d say something smarter than he had.”

— J.D. Salinger

316. “La vida es una partida y hay que vivirla de acuerdo con las reglas del juego.”

— J.D. Salinger

317. “Indeed, all forms of human folly and beastiality touch a very symphathetic chord within our breasts!”

— J.D. Salinger

318. “It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.”

— J.D. Salinger

319. “You hate to tell new stuff to somebody around a hundred years old. They don’t like to hear it.”

— J.D. Salinger

320. “It makes me so depressed I go crazy.”

— J.D. Salinger

321. “Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might. If you do anything at all beautiful on a stage, anything nameless and joy-making, anything above and beyond the call of theatrical ingenuity, S. and I will both rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come around to the stage door with bouquets of snapdragons.”

— J.D. Salinger

322. “The mark of a mature man is not willing to die for a worthy cause, rather it’s willing to live for one.”

— J.D. Salinger

323. “The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla.”

— J.D. Salinger

324. “Ah, Sharon Lipschutz,” said the young man. “How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire.”

— J.D. Salinger

325. “The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white – unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favourite, bunny-loving sister’s expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her – a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.”

— J.D. Salinger

326. “Money always ends up making you blue.”

— J.D. Salinger

327. “The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they’ll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don’t like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they’ll say he’s conceited. Even smart girls do it.”

— J.D. Salinger

328. “If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.”

— J.D. Salinger

329. “As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn’t quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.”

— J.D. Salinger

330. “The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling.”

— J.D. Salinger

331. “Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.”

— J.D. Salinger

332. “I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.”

— J.D. Salinger

333. “Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.”

— J.D. Salinger

334. “People always think something’s all true.”

— J.D. Salinger

335. “I think he was pretty surprised to hear from me. I once called him a fat-assed phony.”

— J.D. Salinger

336. “Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence and beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls.”

— J.D. Salinger

337. “I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face.”

— J.D. Salinger

338. “He once told Allie and I that if he’d had to shoot anybody, he wouldn’t’ve known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.”

— J.D. Salinger

339. “By far the majority of the hundred and eighty-finer poems are immeasurably not light- but high-hearted, and can be read by anyone, anywhere, even aloud in rather progressive orphanages on stormy nights, but I wouldn’t unreservedly recommend the last thirty or thirty-five poems to any living soul who hasn’t died at least twice in his lifetime, preferably slowly.”

— J.D. Salinger

340. “Wow. Death by books. That would have been some way to go.”

— J.D. Salinger

341. “How do you know you’re going to do something, untill you do it?”

— J.D. Salinger

342. “Where you girls from? Don’t answer if you don’t feel like it. I don’t want you to strain yourself.”

— J.D. Salinger

343. “Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.”

— J.D. Salinger

344. “La gente batte sempre le mani per le cose sbagliate.”

— J.D. Salinger

345. “Fortunately, I find that if a situation is funny or risible enough, I tend to bleed less profusely.”

— J.D. Salinger

346. “He looked at me with his eyes shining – yes, shining. The boy’s eyes could shine.”

— J.D. Salinger

347. “As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure – or even intellectual treasure – and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure’s treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety percent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”

— J.D. Salinger

348. “I never did find out what the hell was the matter. Some girls you practically never find out what’s the matter.”

— J.D. Salinger

349. “She had a nice voice. A nice telephone voice, mostly. She should’ve carried a goddamn telephone around with her.”

— J.D. Salinger

350. “He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.”

— J.D. Salinger