Joseph Heller Quotes
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Everything passes. (That's what makes it endurable.)
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He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
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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.
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Insanity is contagious.
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What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.
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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.
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I had examined myself pretty thoroughly and discovered that I was unfit for military service.
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The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
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I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
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When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
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Remember that everyone deserves some fun during working hours.
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But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.
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From men motivated by moral certitude, history teaches, no lasting good ever comes.
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It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.
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Every writer I know has trouble writing.
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I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly.
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Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.
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I couldn't see much point in tying myself down to a middle-aged woman with four children, even though the woman was my wife and the children were my own.
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That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
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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.
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There was only one catch and that was catch 22
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But how can one be warm alone?
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I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing.
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I don't understand the process of imagination-though I know that I am very much at its mercy.