47 quotes
Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
Franny and Zooey (1961)
Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
It naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person — the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist — who can write a poem that is a poem.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
"I never saw so many tigers."
Nine Stories (1953)
Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do absolutely no wrong.
Franny and Zooey (1961)
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
Disputed