She's quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go t….

You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart..

Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also some….

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 pleasurab….

Life is a gift horse in my opinion..

Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly..

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

My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking..

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance….

You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers..

Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy a….

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….

How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground..

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..

Don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everyb….

And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself ….

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 ….

She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that..

Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a st….

I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes..

I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway..