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It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.

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
Thing
Hardly
Admit
Stupid
Didn
Even

More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.
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I said old Jesus probably would've puked if He could see it - all those fancy costumes and all. Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy who plays the kettle drums in the orchestra.
J. D. Salinger
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I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in 'The Catcher In the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.
J. D. Salinger
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You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.
J. D. Salinger
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Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it.
J. D. Salinger
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Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.
J. D. Salinger
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Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy- he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it.
J. D. Salinger
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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
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I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.
J. D. Salinger
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I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.
J. D. Salinger
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But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.
J. D. Salinger
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There are still a few men who love desperately.
J. D. Salinger
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She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
J. D. Salinger
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Do it for the fat lady!
J. D. Salinger
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I am always saying Glad to've met you to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.
J. D. Salinger
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I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.
J. D. Salinger
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If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.
J. D. Salinger
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What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J. D. Salinger