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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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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
Like
Publishing
Marvelous
Pleasure
Peace
Write
Writing
Love

More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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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
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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
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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
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I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.
J. D. Salinger
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I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don't know what to do with their invisible gifts.
J. D. Salinger
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For a psychoanalyst to be any good... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place.
J. D. Salinger
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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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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
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... even the most sublimely accomplished non-stop talker can't consistently please.
J. D. Salinger
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If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will.
J. D. Salinger
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I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.
J. D. Salinger
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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
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Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.
J. D. Salinger
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I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me.
J. D. Salinger
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If you're not in the mood, you can't do that stuff right.
J. D. Salinger
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Happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.
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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Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy?
J. D. Salinger
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There are still a few men who love desperately.
J. D. Salinger
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I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.
J. D. Salinger