Joseph Heller

• "When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"

• "Every writer I know has trouble writing."

Catch 22

• It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

• There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
  
  "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
  
  "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

• "Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."

• Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his philosophy.

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

• 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.

• "Let someone else get killed!"
  
  "Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?"
  
  "Well then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?"

• Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.

• The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.

• Outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals.

• "Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb! "

• Yossarian - the very sight of the name made him shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist.

• "You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail."

• "But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don't make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share."

• This time Milo had gone to far. Bombing his own men and planes was more than even the most phlegmatic observer could stomach, and it looked like the end for him...Milo was all washed up until he opened his books to the public and disclosed the tremendous profit he had made.

• "Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action."

• "Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?" Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. "This long." He snapped his fingers. "A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man."
  
  "Old?" asked Clevinger with surprise. "What are you talking about?"
  
  "Old."
  
  "I'm not old."
  
  "You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow down?" Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.
  
  "Well, maybe it is true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. "Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?"
  
  "I do," Dunbar told him.
  
  "Why?" Clevinger asked.
  
  "What else is there?"

• "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, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?"

• "[T]he God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be."

Something Happened

• I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why.
  
  Something must have happened to me sometime.

• I do know that girls in their early twenties are easy and sweet. (Girls in their late twenties are easier but sad, and that isn't so sweet.) They are easy, I think, because they are sweet, and they are sweet, I think, because they are dumb.

• The years are too short, the days are too long.

• When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

• In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse.

• Women my wife's age with broken marriages take up robustly with fellows much younger than themselves, sometimes boys, and their husbands don't like that part of it at all. (It's a means they have of really sticking it to us. The husbands can do without the money and kids. But they can't abide their wives' humping a younger dick and letting everyone know.)

• Women don't suffer from penis envy. Men do.