Joseph Heller

Novelist

1923-05-01

Quotes by Joseph Heller

• No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.

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

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• It takes brains not to make money,— Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem's signature. —Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.

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• Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.

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• My fish dream is a sex dream.

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• Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.

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• He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar.All right, I'll dance with you, she said, before Yossarian could even speak. But I won't let you sleep with me.Who asked you? Yossarian asked her.You don't want to sleep with me? she exclaimed with surprise.I don't want to dance with you.

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

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• But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.

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• Colonel Cathcart is our commanding officer and we must obey him. Why don't you fly four more missions and see what happens?I don't want to.Suppose we let you pick your missions and fly milk runs? Major Major said. That way you can fly the four missions and not run any risks.I don't want to fly milk runs. I don't want to be in the war anymore.Would you like to see our country lose? Major Major asked.We won't lose. We've got more men, more money, and more material. There are ten million men in uniform who could replace me. Some people are getting killed and a lot more are making money and having fun. Let somebody else get killed.But suppose everybody on our side felt that way?Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way. Wouldn't I?

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• The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him because the games were so interesting they were foolish.

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• Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.

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

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• -You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!

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

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• The enemy, retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.

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

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• There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?

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• Every writer I know has trouble writing.

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