Joseph Heller Thinking Quotations

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

I don't think it's good to achieve too much at too early an age. What else can the future give you if you've already got all that your imagination has dreamt up for you? A writer is only discovered once in a lifetime, and if it happens very early the impossibility of matching that moment again can have a somewhat corrosive effect on his personality and indeed on the work itself.

All of our religions but the Judaic and the Greek think more of us dead than alive.

I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy

From now on I'm thinking only of me." Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way." "Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?

Who's they?" He wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?" "Every one of them," Yossarian told him. "Every one of whom?" "Every one of whom do you think?" "I haven't any idea." "Then how do you know they aren't?" "Because..." Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration. Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all.

Men," he began his address to the officers, measuring his pauses carefully. "You're American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it.

I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly.