Joseph Heller Quotes

The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped pl...

Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hop...

I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked, apple-cheeked, curlyheaded, midget assed, , google-eyed...

He was pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions...

Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fea...

Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.

General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they'll mak...

[Chief White Halfoat:] Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It's a terribl...

There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the h...

Who's they?" He wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?""Every one...

Why are they going to disappear him?'I don't know.'It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar...

His heart cracked, and he fell in love. He wondered if she would marry him. “Tu sei pazzo,” she told...

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt...

It takes brains not to make money,” Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regul...

Colonel Cathcart is our commanding officer and we must obey him. Why don't you fly four more mission...

Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebo...

No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might hav...

The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from...

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

The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, n...

...You know, one good apple can spoil the rest,” Colonel Korn concluded with conscious irony.

Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had b...

It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance ev...

-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, ...

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in t...

My fish dream is a sex dream.

Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably betwee...

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

She reminded him of (...) all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provide...

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a ...

All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars.

But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge...

History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress...

Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help ...

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos...

They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.

The spirit gone, man is garbage.

Four times during the first six days they were assembled and briefed and then sent back. Once, they ...

There was shish-kabob for lunch, huge, savory hunks of spitted meat sizzling like the devil over cha...

Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pern...

What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amuse...

He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anza...

There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten a...

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and...

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

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22 which specified the concern for one's own safety in ...

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs divorce fornicatio...

The important thing is to keep them pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter wheth...

They were frisky, eager and exuberant, and they had all been friends in the States. They were plainl...

There is no disappointment so numbing...as someone no better than you achieving more.

I don't want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon th...

mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.

Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; ca...

Oh well," McWatt sang, "what the hell.

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his 'Every Chang...

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But i...

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

That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumsta...