Top 400 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “Money always ends up making you blue.”

— J.D. Salinger

302. “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

303. “He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn’t know why.”

— J.D. Salinger

304. “Thirty-seven of them will be about shy, reclusive pennsylvania dutch lesbian who wants to write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

310. “God damn it,” he said, “there are nice things in the world- and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

312. “You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.”

— J.D. Salinger

313. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

316. “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

317. “Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they’re always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that’s even newer. I don’t even like old cars. I mean they don’t even interest me. I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.”

— J.D. Salinger

318. “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

319. “She’s quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that’s what she is, roller-skate skinny. You’d like her.”

— J.D. Salinger

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “You keep 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. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education, it’s history.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

325. “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

326. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.”

— J.D. Salinger

332. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

334. “I could happily lie down and die sometimes.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

336. “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

337. “I mean he’d keep telling you to unify and simplify all the time. Some things you just can’t do that to.”

— J.D. Salinger

338. “Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance.”

— J.D. Salinger

339. “I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn’t.”

— J.D. Salinger

340. “It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.”

— J.D. Salinger

341. “She yelled ‘Good luck!’ at me the same way old Spencer did when I left Pencey. God, how I hate when somebody yells ‘Good luck!’ at me when I’m leaving somewhere. It’s depressing.”

— J.D. Salinger

342. “I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn’t blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.”

— J.D. Salinger

343. “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

344. “When they argue, there can be no danger of a permanent rift, because they’re Mother and Daughter. A terrible and beautiful phenomenon to watch.”

— J.D. Salinger

345. “She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what bastard she was the mother of. But you can’t always tell – with somebody’s mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.”

— J.D. Salinger

346. “That’s the terrible part. I swear to God I’m a madman.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

348. “I’m sorry, I’m awful, I’ve just felt so terribly destructive all week. It’s awful. I’m horrible.”

— J.D. Salinger

349. “This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I’m still around, but from here on in, for reasons I’m not at liberty to disclose, I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.”

— J.D. Salinger

350. “Aunt – Uh – There’s a war on. Uh – I mean you’ve seen it on the newsreels. I mean you’ve heard it on the radio and all, haven’t you?”

— J.D. Salinger