Joseph Heller Quotes

141 Sourced Quotes

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

Joseph Heller
Under Colonel Korn's rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did.

Joseph Heller
God had no need for Ecclesiastes to acquaint Him with vanity.

Joseph Heller
What do you do when it rains?" The captain answered frankly. "I get wet.

Joseph Heller
I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them. There's nothing negative about running away to save my life.

Joseph Heller
It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you're supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor. That morning I went to my job at the advertising agency and wrote out the first chapter in longhand.... One year later, after much planning, I began chapter two.

Joseph Heller
Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.

Joseph Heller
History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.

Joseph Heller
I've come to look upon death the same way I look upon root-canal work. Everyone else seems to get through it all right, so it couldn't be too difficult for me.

Joseph Heller
She was a crazy mathematics major from the Wharton School of Business who could not count to twenty-eight each month without getting into trouble.

Joseph Heller
Yossarian had so many ailments to be afraid of that he was sometimes tempted to turn himself in to the hospital for good and spend the rest of his life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent with a battery of specialists and nurses seated at one side of his bed twenty-four hours a day waiting for something to go wrong..

Joseph Heller
If a man is going to leave one wife to marry another, it's better if he divorces the first before he marries the second.

Joseph Heller
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.

Joseph Heller
He was pinched perspiringly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unable to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery and never without hope.

Joseph Heller
I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'

Joseph Heller
There are yawning gulfs into which large chunks of me have fallen. I do not always know where I am at present.

Joseph Heller
I don't believe in miracles because it's been a long time since we've had any.

Joseph Heller
Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

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

Joseph Heller
How do you expect anyone to believe you have a liver condition if you keep squeezing the nurses' tits every time you get a chance? You're going to have to give up sex if you want to convince people you've got an ailing liver.

Joseph Heller
In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.

Joseph Heller