“Saving the human race is a frantic one. Or a tedious one. It all depends on what stage of the process you're taking part in.”

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

“Let me repeat. I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say. A youth, father to what will—must—someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who—he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass wall of his tumbler, until he either gave up or was himself, by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed.”

“Can't be part of the rat race when you're one of the rats who knows you're in a cage.”

“Participation - that's what's gonna save the human race.”

“Whether or not you get what you're looknig for depends entirely on one things and one thing only. It depends on your willingness to do something different.”