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""You know Adam?" Teddy asked him."Do I know who?""Adam. In the Bible."Nicholson smiled. "Not personally," he said dryly."

""You love God, don't you?" Nicholson asked, with a little excess of quietness. "Isn't that your forte, so to speak? From what I heard on that tape and from what Al Babcock —" "Yes, sure, I love Him. B…"

""I see you are looking at my feet," he said to her when car was in motion."I beg your pardon?" said the woman."I said I see you're looking at my feet"."I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at t…"

""I never saw so many tigers.""

"There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time."

"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. ... It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasu…"

"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."

"Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear."

"She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."

"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observati…"

"When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my wor…"

"The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation."

"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."

"Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly."

"Chinua Achebe: The Lecture Heard Around The World"

"If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will."

"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 ab…"

"The Letters to J. D. Salinger book"

"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."

"Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quiet…"

"For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort."

"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."

"Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Es…"

"Running all over the sea trying to get behind the weather."

"The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab."

"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. … It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure…"

"Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea whic…"

"His name was Jermyn, and he dodged all day long about the galley drying his handkerchief before the stove. Apparently he never slept. He was a dismal man, with a perpetual tear sparkling at the end of…"

"Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end."

"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to."

"Jesus knew — knew — that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know t…"

"He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor."

"In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom."

"I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience."

"There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the co…"

"Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formi…"

"Implied Meanings in J. D. Salinger Stories and Inverting" in Hermeneutics In Russia Vol. 2 · PDF"

"It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose."

"I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the p…"

"The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."

"One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food become."

"He feared neither God, nor devil, nor man, nor wind, nor sea, nor his own conscience. And I believe he hated everybody and everything. But I think he was afraid to die. I believe I am the only man who…"

"Only a seaman realises to what great extent an entire ship reflects the personality and ability of one individual, her Commanding Officer. To a landsman, this is not understandable—and sometimes it is…"

"Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond — a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond m…"

"Dead Caulfields. The early life and work of J.D. Salinger"

"Behind the shower curtain, Zooey closed his eyes for a few seconds, as though his own small craft were listing precariously in the wake. Then he pulled back the shower curtain and stared over at the c…"

"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules. - Mr. Spencer"

"It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth."

"He wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes — fools, no."

"Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions."

"Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it…"

"The truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from so…"

"The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, … It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does n…"

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

"A man's most open actions have a secret side to them."

"You raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right — God knows it's depressing. I'…"

"Remembering Two Great American Authors"

"To the destruction of what is."

"All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it. Leave that to the moralists, my boy. History is made by men, but they do not make …"

"Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her."