There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the tranquility found in writing privately rather than for public consumption.
In this quote, J.D. Salinger reflects on the joy and peace that come from writing solely for oneself. He conveys a sense of discomfort with sharing his work publicly, suggesting that the act of publishing encroaches upon his personal space and privacy. Writing for his own pleasure is a deeply personal experience, and he values the intimacy of that process over the pressures and expectations of public visibility. Salinger's words underscore the importance of self-expression without the need for external validation.
In practice
When discussing the importance of maintaining personal space in creative work.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. 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. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat
Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?
That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
I just would like to keep singing. As soon as I'm not singing well, I hope that I know it, so that I can get off the stage and leave what I have done. I hope I'll know, and if I don't, I hope somebody tells me.
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.
Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend. It would look ridiculous to do what we're doing now when I'm 40. That's why I want to destroy my career before it's too late.
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