It was the last game of the year and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win.

The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

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.

There are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked.

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.

Some of my best friedns are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children.

I kept picturing all these little kids in this big field of rye... If they're running and they don't look where they're going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.