I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.

The catcher in the rye... that's all I really want to be.

I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake--especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.

If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did.

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. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men.

I can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood.

You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.