Life is a long failure of understanding ... a long, mistaken shutting of the heart.

My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace. (New Year's Eve, 1947)

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.