Joseph Heller Quotes

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

There were reviews that were good, a good many that were mixed, and there were reviews that were bad, very bad, almost venomously spiteful, one might be tempted to say (and I am the one that might say it).

I used to joke—and it wasn’t much of an exaggeration— that a story I would mail to the New Yorker in the morning would be back with its concise, slighting rejection slip in the afternoon mail that same day.

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

And a man who lay with a beast, said the Lord, would surely die. And if he doesn’t lie with a beast, I would have countered, he won’t die?

If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?

‘Yossarian? Is that his name? Yossarian? What the hell kind of a name is Yossarian?’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf had the facts at his finger tips. ‘It’s Yossarian’s name, sir,’ he explained.

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.