J.D. Salinger

You ought to go to a boy's school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. "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 goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.

Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are... Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God.

All these angels start coming out of the boxes and everywhere, guys carrying crucifixes and stuff all over the place, and the whole bunch of them - thousands of them - singing __ome All Ye Faithful_ like mad. Big deal. It__ supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can__ see anything religious or pretty, for God__ sake, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage. When they all finished and started going out the boxes again, you could tell they could hardly wait to get a cigarette of something. I saw it with old Sally Hayes the year before, and she kept saying how beautiful it was, the costumes and all. I said old jesus probably would__e puked if he could see it.

One of the few things left in the world, aside from the world itself, that sadden me every day is an awareness that you get upset if Boo Boo or Walt tells you you're saying something that sounds like me. You sort of take it as an accusation of piracy, a little slam at your individuality. Is it so bad that we sometimes sound like each other? The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose... For us, doesn't each of our individualities begin right at the point where we own up to our extremely close connections and accept the inevitability of borrowing one another's jokes, talents, idiocies?

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

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

I__ just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else__. I__ sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It__ disgusting.

Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell

I don't like it when it stings,' he said. 'Nobody does.

If you're not inthe mood, you can't do that stuff right.

God, how I still love private readers. It__ what we all used to be.

The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

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.

Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

In my mind, I'm probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw.

Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl.

I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something.