Joseph Heller Quotes - Page 5

I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.

When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.

It's a wise person, I guess, who knows he's dumb, and an honest person who knows he's a liar. And it's a dumb person, I guess, whose convinced he's wise...-Bob Slocum

It made him proud that 29 months in the service had not blunted his genius for ineptitude.

Well then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?

I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.

Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?

I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.

Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.

A man's head is his castle.

I don't think it's good to achieve too much at too early an age. What else can the future give you if you've already got all that your imagination has dreamt up for you? A writer is only discovered once in a lifetime, and if it happens very early the impossibility of matching that moment again can have a somewhat corrosive effect on his personality and indeed on the work itself.

Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'

She was the epitome of stately sorrow each time she smiled.

Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.

I could not write about a subject sacred to me because I would be too flippant. Fortunately, there are no subjects sacred to me.

There's a rule saying I have to ground anyone who's crazy ... There's a catch. Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.

He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar. "All right, I'll dance with you," she said, before Yossarian could even speak. "But I won't let you sleep with me." "Who asked you?" Yossarian asked her. "You don't want to sleep with me?" she exclaimed with surprise. "I don't want to dance with you.

Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office.

where are the snowdens of yesteryear?

Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian's lust; but she was willing to take is word for it.

In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out.

That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.