Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “It makes me so depressed I go crazy.”

— J.D. Salinger

302. “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

303. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

310. “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

311. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

327. “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

328. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

330. “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

331. “Tout le monde est une nonne.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

333. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

336. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

339. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

345. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

348. “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

349. “I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to see who was coughing.”

— J.D. Salinger

350. “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