Quotes by Joseph Heller

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

General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so theyll make a good impression on the enemy when theyre shot down.

They were frisky, eager and exuberant, and they had all been friends in the States. They were plainly unthinkable. They were noisy, overconfident, empty-headed kids of twenty-one. They had gone to college and were engaged to pretty, clean girls whose pictures were already standing on the rough cement mantelpiece of Orrs fireplace. They had ridden in speedboats and played tennis. They had been horseback riding. One had once been to bed with an older woman. They knew the same poeple in different parts of the country and had gone to school with each others cousins.

Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy

Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his Every Change Is for the Worse should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.

He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order.

The important thing is to keep them pledging, he explained to his cohorts. It doesnt matter whether they mean it or not. Thats why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what pledge and allegiance mean.

Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always disappointed. Because he NEEDED a friend so desperately, he never found one.

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

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

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.Thats some catch, that Catch-22, he observed.Its the best there is, Doc Daneeka agreed.Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasnt quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Applebys eyes. he had Orrs word to take for Applebys eyes.

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if its to seem long. But in that event, who wants one? I do, Dunbar told him. Why? Clevinger asked. What else is there?

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs divorce fornication bullying travel meditation medication depression neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.

Frankly Id like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22 which specified the concern for ones own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

Destiny is a good thing to accept when its going your way. When it isnt, dont call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.

“Show me anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new, and I will show you it hath been.”