693 Quotes by J.D. Salinger

You're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there.

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.

If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible.

It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

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.

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

Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I think people are plotting to make me happy.

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.

I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music and I'll bolt the door.