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I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do 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
Regularly
Alone
Pleasure
Write
Left
Writing
Love
Assure

More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.
J. D. Salinger
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His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them
J. D. Salinger
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Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat.
J. D. Salinger
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Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.
J. D. Salinger
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I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.
J. D. Salinger
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I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.
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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After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.
J. D. Salinger
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Happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.
J. D. Salinger
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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
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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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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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She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn't as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.
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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Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.
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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Zooey said... It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.
J. D. Salinger
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I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.
J. D. Salinger
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One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.
J. D. Salinger
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She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.
J. D. Salinger