Top 100 Heller Quotes
#1. We drove in silence for a while.
"Can I have a gun?" I asked.
"No!"
"Just a little one? For my handbag? It'll give me some street cred with the client."
"No! No! No!"
His clenched fists pounded the steering wheel with each word.
- heller 1
J.D. Nixon
#2. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.
Christopher Hitchens
#3. If I am confirmed, I will commit to show Heller and the principles articulated in it the full measure of respect that is due to all constitution decisions of the court.
Elena Kagan
#4. I think it's possible - perhaps even necessary - to find comedy in any war. I mean, look at the brilliant work which was done by Joseph Heller and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H) and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Svejk - which I haven't read, but have heard was funny).
Dave Abrams
#5. Heller wrote Catch-22 in the evenings after work, sitting at the kitchen table in his Manhattan apartment.
Mason Currey
#6. I like Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels - Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig - invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn't do the job they had in mind.
William Zinsser
#7. I think the tone of mockery Heller finds is a part of Mann's irony, but only a part - a brilliant further touch consists in juxtaposing perspectives so that we're led to wonder whether the mockery itself is the last word.
Philip Kitcher
#8. I was eighteen when I first read Joseph Heller's stunning work 'Catch-22,' and was at that time close to being drafted for the fruitless and unenlightened war in Viet Nam.
Thomas Steinbeck
#9. Ms. Heller," said the man, "if you can hear me, say something, will you?" "What do you want, I'm shouting!" Lauren said at the top of her voice. "Now I see it," one of the female voices said. "Like she's trying to talk. I don't know what she said." "I think she said 'Ow.
Joseph Finder
#10. Heller," he called after me. "I don't know what you have up your sleeve, but I suggest you not bother. Like Sun Tzu said: 'All battles are won or lost before they're fought.
Joseph Finder
#11. There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.
Matt Gallagher
#12. I've started researching online journals for the project. Thanks for decoding Dr. Heller's notes before sending them to me. If you'd have forwarded them to me without a translation, I'd be searching for a tall building/overpass/water tower from which to yell goodbye cruel world.
Tammara Webber
#13. 'Diary of a Teenage Girl' was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It's based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs.
Bel Powley
#14. Roark threw his head up once, for a flash of a second, to look at Heller across the table. It was all the introduction they needed; it was like a handshake.
Ayn Rand
#15. I went at one stage to turn on the radio, but he glared
at me so ferociously that I hurriedly lean't back in my
seat and looked out the window instead.
- heller 1
J.D. Nixon
#16. Now that my kids are out of the house, I'm finally able to get to the classics I never read: Emily Bronte, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22.' It's endless. They're all in this gigantic pile next to my bed.
Robin Wright
#17. offered a modicum of privacy, and for an overnight price of only 50 Heller.
Anonymous
#18. There's a great quote from Henry Kissinger, which I became aware of from reading [Joseph] Heller's Good As Gold. He said: 'Every great achievement was a dream before it became a reality.'
Roy Hodgson
#19. That this was once the middle of nowhere and now it's not even that.
Peter Heller
#20. I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.
Joseph Heller
#21. In other words, I am the Brunette Who Keeps Her Head.
Jane Heller
#22. I'd be the last colonel in the world to order you to go to that U.S.O. show and have a good time, but I want every one of you who isn't sick enough to be in a hospital to go to that U.S.O. show right now and have a good time, and that's an order!
Joseph Heller
#23. Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.
Peter Heller
#24. Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.
Peter Heller
#25. Yossarian wrinkled his forehead with quizzical amusement. You won't marry me because I'm crazy, and you say I'm crazy because I want to marry you? Is that right?
Joseph Heller
#27. As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.
Joseph Heller
#28. There is wisdom in madness, and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everybody is capable of everything.
Joseph Heller
#29. That crazy bastard may be the only sane one left.
Joseph Heller
#30. Managers are to information as alcoholics are to booze. They consume enormous amounts, constantly crave more, but have great difficulty in digesting their existing intake.
Robert Heller
#31. Erogenous zones are either everywhere or nowhere.
Joseph Heller
#32. The moment I felt my life return was when I took a breath and said to him, No thank you. Were I as perfect as you are demanding, life would be rather boring.
Paula Heller Garland
#33. For something made of wires, bits, and bytes, technology can elicit some fairly strong emotions in the people who attempt to use it.
Martha Heller
#35. Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
Peter Heller
#37. When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.
Peter Heller
#38. All of the years I spent trying to be someone you could be proud of would have been better spent being proud of myself for who I already was.
Paula Heller Garland
#39. I mean it felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful.
Peter Heller
#40. I never thought I would be a painter. That I might make a world and walk into it and forget myself. That art would be something I would not have any way of not doing.
Peter Heller
#41. The only thing going on was a war, and no one seemed to notice but Yossarian and Dunbar. And when Yossarian tried to remind people, they drew away from him and thought he was crazy.
Joseph Heller
#42. Orr was one of the homeliest freaks Yossarian had ever encountered, and one of the most attractive.
Joseph Heller
#43. I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
Zoe Heller
#44. I hate when people use this term, but Matt Weiner is a genius.
Randee Heller
#45. Elegance loses its power in the presence of the properly stupid ...
Zoe Heller
#46. Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.
Peter Heller
#47. And my heart is breaking
My heart is lying on the floor in a pool of tears
I keep asking the same questions only to have them unanswered
Paula Heller Garland
#48. Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.
Laurence Heller
#49. I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing.
Joseph Heller
#50. And between us now there is this continual underground struggle over something trivial and nebulous that won't abate and has lasted nearly as long as the two of us have known each other. I love you.
Joseph Heller
#51. I've flown over seventy goddam combat missions. Don't talk to me about fighting to save my country. I've been fighting all along to save my country. Now I'm going to fight a little to save myself. The country's not in danger any more, but I am.
Joseph Heller
#53. Open your heart to a baseball team and you're liable to get it broken.
Jane Heller
#54. Where were you born?"
"On a battlefield," [Yossarian] answered.
"No, no. In what state were you born?"
"In a state of innocence.
Joseph Heller
#55. Look, I might keep interested in this if you stop shouting it all over the island and if you stick to killing Colonel Cathcart. But if you're going to turn it into a bloodbath, you can forget about me.
Joseph Heller
#56. Never name a show after a character if you want to be the guy running the show.
Bruno Heller
#57. I had examined myself pretty thoroughly and discovered that I was unfit for military service.
Joseph Heller
#58. I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy
Joseph Heller
#59. [They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
Joseph Heller
#60. Design is the best way to get from A to B when you don't yet know what B is.
Cheryl Heller
#61. we are nine years out. The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more. The
Peter Heller
#62. I want to protect and preserve social security and Medicare.
Dean Heller
#64. In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn't stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he'd made them something else.
Joseph Heller
#65. People may say no one ever died of a broken heart, but when you're suffering from one, it sure doesn't feel that way
at least initially.
Paula Heller Garland
#66. Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.
Joseph Heller
#67. We are bound by the secrets we share.
Zoe Heller
#68. It was just before dawn during the Great Big Siege of Bologna, when tongueless dead men peopled the night hours like living ghosts and Hungry Joe was half out of his mind with anxiety because he had finished his missions
Joseph Heller
#69. You can't take the New York out of the girl. It's like a little country girl coming to the big city.
Randee Heller
#71. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Joseph Heller
#72. Your eyes told me to trust you, your heart's beat told me you were afraid of getting broken too, the only thing you didn't tell me was how to let go once you were gone...
Elizabeth Heller
#73. If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
Peter Heller
#74. If someone in my life could grow with confrontation and feedback, why would I choose to refrain?
Paula Heller Garland
#75. I open it so he has no choice. At the crack of the top and the sound of the fizz he winces like one more Coke down, one less in the world.
Peter Heller
#76. I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them. There's nothing negative about running away to save my life.
Joseph Heller
#77. As soon as there was profit, there were people who wanted to make it, more than they wanted to make anything else.
Joseph Heller
#78. They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.
Joseph Heller
#79. He's getting old. I don't count the years. I don't multiply by seven. They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn't they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man?
Peter Heller
#80. Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that.
Peter Heller
#81. Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was going to lose
Joseph Heller
#83. I go outside, bundled against the wind from the east. I wander the streets of my past, waiting for one more dawn.
Jason Heller
#84. I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.
Zoe Heller
#85. When you get to the fourth, fifth and sixth years of a show, it's really good to have held back, so that you have somewhere to go. That also applies to levels of violence, levels of humor, levels of production value.
Bruno Heller
#86. From men motivated by moral certitude, history teaches, no lasting good ever comes.
Joseph Heller
#87. But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.
Joseph Heller
#88. One of the things he wanted to start screaming about was the surgeon's knife that was almost certain to be waiting for him and everyone else who lived long enough to die.
Joseph Heller
#89. Once when Gold was visiting in Florida,his father drew him across the street just to meet some friends and introduced him by saying,"This is my son's brother.The one that never amounted to much.
Joseph Heller
#90. The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.
Robert Heller
#91. You can't be someone you're not on TV. You can in movies, but not on TV because you can't hide.
Bruno Heller
#92. Effective management always means asking the right question.
Robert Heller
#93. She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.
Peter Heller
#94. No executive devotes effort to proving himself wrong.
Robert Heller
#95. Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
Joseph Heller
#96. Keep away, keep away," Hungry Joe screamed. "I said keep away, keep away, you goddam stinking lousy son of a bitch." "At least we found out what he dreams about," Dunbar observed wryly. "He dreams about goddam stinking lousy sons of bitches.
Joseph Heller
#97. But you couldn't change the past; you could only alter the way you dealt with it in the present.
Mandasue Heller
#99. the End of Everything meant the End maybe for all time, maybe in all the universe, of Golf.
Peter Heller
#100. He's back! He's back!"
"Who's back?" shouted someone else. "Who is it?"
"What does it mean? What should we do?"
"Are we on fire?"
"Get up and run, damn it! Everybody get up and run!
Joseph Heller
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