I don't hate too many guys. What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert Ackley. I hate them once in a while—I admit it—but it doesn't last too long, is what I mean. After a while, if I didn't see them, if they didn't come in the room, or if I didn't see them in the dining room for a couple of meals, I sort of missed them. I mean I sort of missed them.

I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.

Give me an honest con man any day.

But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands?

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.