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An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
J. D. Salinger
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J. D. Salinger
Age: 91 †
Born: 1919
Born: January 1
Died: 2010
Died: January 27
Author
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Jerome David Salinger
Jerome Salinger
Term
Anyone
Artist
Art
Shoot
Else
Perfection
Writing
Concern
Kind
Terms
Creative
More quotes by J. D. Salinger
Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle.
J. D. Salinger
probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. how well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. she was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that
J. D. Salinger
I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.
J. D. Salinger
Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.
J. D. Salinger
I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.
J. D. Salinger
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
J. D. Salinger
It's so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't mean they haven't done it.
J. D. Salinger
All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
J. D. Salinger
His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like 'the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo.
J. D. Salinger
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
I'd swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.
J. D. Salinger
I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.
J. D. Salinger
Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)
J. D. Salinger
Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat.
J. D. Salinger
Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.
J. D. Salinger
We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.
J. D. Salinger
I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.
J. D. Salinger
Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.
J. D. Salinger
You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.
J. D. Salinger
She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.
J. D. Salinger
