You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?' he asked. 'You know what was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all that was in it. So—this is...
Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the ai...
Walt, at about eleven, had a routine of looking at Seymour's wrists and telling him to take off his sweater. Take off your sweater, hey, Seymour. Go ahead, hey. It's warm in here. S. would beam back a...
They're not, Franny said. That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they're not poe...
The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs--if yours are really ones and theirs aren't. You think if they're intelligent and all, the oth...
The little girl on the planeWho turned her doll's head aroundTo look at me.
Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it.
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
People are always ruining things for you.
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.
I'm profoundly attracted to classical Zen literature, I have the gall to lecture on it and the literature of Mahayana Buddhism one night a week at college, but my life itself couldn't very conceivably...
I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a...
I said I thought she had a very fine voice.She nodded. 'I know. I'm going to be a professional singer.'
I mean if thousands of little kids are running and they do not look where they are going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day, I just be the catcher in the rye an...
I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't.
I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.
I knew this one Catholic boy, Louis Shaney, when I was at the Whooton School. Then, after a while, right in the middle of the goddam conversation, he asked me, Did you happen to notice where the Catho...
Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.
Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest.
Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?