Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

Sometimes it was hell to conceal her impatience over the male of the species’ general ineptness,

“If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything.

I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.

And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is beginning to drive me out of my seat. It seems terribly important to try, though.

and though we’ve talked and talked and talked, we’ve all agreed not to say a word.

As much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn’t quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.

looked directly into his own eyes, as though his eyes were neutral territory, a no man’s land in a private war against narcissism he had been fighting since he was seven or eight years old.

Give me an honest con man any day.”

I’m tired as hell of getting up furious in the morning and going to bed furious at night.

The minute I’m in a room with somebody who has the usual number of ears, I either turn into a goddam seer or a human hatpin.

I suppose I’ll like him for that till I die.

I’m sick to death of being the heavy in everybody’s life.

You can’t just walk out on the results of your own hankerings.

“You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.”

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