“He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony ...” — J. D. Salinger Quote

“He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.”

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”

“I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself.”

“I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.”

“It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.”

“How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.”

“I'm tired of liberals dividing this country up into little groups, setting them upon each other, breeding spite and envy, and then having the nerve to accuse conservatives of hatred.”

“To those who accuse us of being populists, we respond that if this means listening to the people, then yes, we are!”

“When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don't want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren't. There are pranks, IMs.”

“It seems to be the modern Canadian approach to Indigenous people: rather than deny their problems or accuse them of creating them through their own laziness, which was how my parents' generation dealt with the question, we now smother them with humid apologies and abnegation, but not actual compensation.”

“Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.”