J.D. Salinger

"It's terribly hard to be honest with yourself about things."

"The trouble is always the same, no matter what."

"I'm a pacifist, but I really am capable of murder."

"You really have to love people to be able to stand them."

"The real tragedy is always in the details nobody notices."

"I think everybody is crazy, really I do."

"The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs."

"I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot."

"Keeping the mind alive is a full-time job."

"I think that one's memories of one's own past is a good deal more up to the point than anything else can be."

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

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

"I don't know. It kills me. It really does."

"All the girls in history books, it kills me if they're beautiful."

"The terrible thing, the really terrible thing, is that I don't know how to love anybody."

"Almost everything I have written is a sort of elegy to yet another phase of my own past."

"What really knocks me out is a book that makes the world stop for a moment so you can sit around and wonder about it."

"I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not glad I met."

"I believe that iniquity will force him to stay on the planet."

"The worst thing that can happen to a person is to remember his own childhood."

"I hate actors. They're such phonies."

"It really does. It kills me."

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior."

"I was born myself in this decade, and so I know something about it."

"The more expensive the school is, the more crooks it has."

"I really do. I'm quite sure I do."

"I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it."

"It's funny. It really is."

"I don't know where you're going to go, or what you're going to do, but I know you're going to be fine."

"The central conceit of the work is that all the things that make modern life difficult are also the things that make it valuable."