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I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.
Joseph Heller -
I can't start writing until I have a closing line.
Joseph Heller
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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.
Joseph Heller -
Well then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?
Joseph Heller -
It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.
Joseph Heller -
Erogenous zones are either everywhere or nowhere.
Joseph Heller -
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.
Joseph Heller -
To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.
Joseph Heller
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Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all. I'm cold,' Snowden said. 'I'm cold.
Joseph Heller -
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.
Joseph Heller -
If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?
Joseph Heller -
Under Colonel Korn's rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did.
Joseph Heller -
Let someone else get killed!
Joseph Heller -
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
Joseph Heller
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Men went mad and were rewarded with medals.
Joseph Heller -
Well, he died. You don't get any older than that.
Joseph Heller -
Gold was not altogether certain what, anatomically, a gorge was, but he knew that his was rising.
Joseph Heller -
The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as...the frog?
Joseph Heller -
The body stores the trauma of our lives in muscular rigidity, thereby keeping us stuck in the past. When we release the tension in the body and align ourselves with gravity, we take a new stand in life. This allows us to be at ease with ourselves and in harmony in our relationship to others and to our planet.
Joseph Heller -
She was the epitome of stately sorrow each time she smiled.
Joseph Heller
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Rise above principal and do what's right.
Joseph Heller -
The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Joseph Heller -
How did I get here? Somebody pushed me. Somebody must have set me off in this direction and clus-ters of other hands must have touched themselves to the controls at various times, for I would not have picked this way for the world.
Joseph Heller -
There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.
Joseph Heller