If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.
("The Catcher in the Rye")
More Quotes from J.D. Salinger:
I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn't blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.J.D. Salinger
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
J.D. Salinger
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.
J.D. Salinger
That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.
J.D. Salinger
I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.
J.D. Salinger
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all… I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye
J.D. Salinger
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
How do you know antiquity was foolish? How do you know the present is wise? Who made it foolish? Who made it wise?Francois Rabelais
Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.
Sara Paretsky
Yeah; I'm a much better blues player than anybody knows, but being in the kind of group I'm in, we were always trying to make popular records.
Stephen Stills