People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you're not.

After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.

Real ugly girls have it tough. I feel so sorry for them sometimes.

Give me an honest con man any day.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.

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

People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily and he had very red hair.

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.

Then I thought of something, all of a sudden. Hey, listen, I said. You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance? I realized it was only one chance in a million.

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.

Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?

The thing with kids in, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything or do anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.

Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

When I'd originally loaded the car and held the door open for him, I'd had a passing impulse to pick him up bodily and insert him gently through the open window.

It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world.

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

If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.

Liberate yourself from my vice-like grip!