Quotes About Catch 22

#1. I love a novel that's funny, and The Taxman Cometh is very funny, delightfully well-written, yet with a serious message about how government bureaucracy affects us all. Read. Enjoy. And if a comparison to Catch 22 pops into your mind, that's not surprising.

Marvin Kalb

#2. In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

#3. I'm serious, Mar, I don't know how to act around him now. I can't be nice, because he'll hate that. But I can't be mean just to be nice."
"You really need medication."
"I'm in a quandary. A Catch-22. I'm screwed.

Kristin Walker

#4. You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.

Jasper Fforde

#5. There's a catch. Catch-22.

Joseph Heller

#6. Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon ... remarkable ... This is a book that I could wish everyone to read. It is a book which should help us feel more clearly

Philip Toynbee

#7. There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can't know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy.

Harlan Coben

#8. Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22: if he flies he is crazy, and doesn't have to; but if he doesn't want to he must be sane and has to. That's some catch ...

Joseph Heller

#9. I was in Kenya when I read 'Catch-22,' and I associate this book that has nothing to do with Kenya - whenever I think of 'Catch-22,' I think of Nairobi.

D. B. Weiss

#10. 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

#11. 'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.

Alan Arkin

#12. This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.

Pamela Paul

#13. There is no light. I don't feel like starting my generator. I used to get a big kick out saving people's lives. Now I wonder what the hell's the point, since they all have to die anyway.Dr. Stubbs Catch -22

Joseph Heller

#14. You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#15. Catch-22 says they have the right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.

Joseph Heller

#16. The Catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible.

Kathryn Schulz

#17. 'Catch-22's first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.

Christopher Buckley

#18. Burns notes the catch-22 nature of depression: The worse we feel, the more distorted our thoughts become, and this thinking plunges us even lower into black feelings about ourselves. Nearly

Tom Butler-Bowdon

#19. For women the wage gap sets up an infuriating Catch-22 situation. They do the housework because they earn less, and they earn lessbecause they do the housework.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

#20. I feel like part of your job as an actor is you're going to get noticed, and the more successful you get, the more noticed you are. It's kind of like a Catch-22.

Lynn Collins

#21. I cited 'Catch-22' as a landmark film and one of my favourites.

John Curran

#22. This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.

David Sedaris

#23. The fictional character with whom I most profoundly identified was Yossarian in Catch-22. Always did, still do.

Neil Cross

#24. Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for the much needed salve
it feels good to finally laugh about Iraq. Fobbit deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war.

Jonathan Evison

#25. A term came to her that they used on occasion at the shelter: the double bind ... They used the expression in much the same way that they would use a term like catch-22.

Chris Bohjalian

#26. You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it's a catch-22: all of those things you're willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.

Jodi Picoult

#27. It's kind of a catch-22 now because since the 'Da Vinci Code,' I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me, but I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about.

Dan Brown

#28. That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked, apple-cheeked, curlyheaded, midget assed, , google-eyed, undersized, grinning, buck-toothed rat!!" Yossarian sputtered.
~ Catch-22

Joseph Heller

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

Joseph Heller

#30. It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

Jodi Picoult

#31. Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you, I found out, you can't do a comedy unless you've just done a comedy.

Val Kilmer

#32. There was one catch, and that was Catch-22.

Joseph Heller

#33. 'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.

Mike Nichols

#34. There's a rule saying I have to ground anyone who's crazy ... There's a catch. Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.

Joseph Heller

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. It's always a Catch-22 situation. They hate you if you're the same, and they hate you if you're different.

Eddie Van Halen

#38. 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

#39. Industrialization created the Father's Catch-22:;: a dad loving his children by being away from the love of his children.

Warren Farrell

#40. 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. That's some catch, that catch-22.

Joseph Heller

#41. I could play it safe by recording songs that are familiar, but am I expanding myself as an artist by doing covers? It's a catch-22. It's called show business: The word 'business' is in it, and you've got to be a businessman. But then again, you have to be true to yourself as an artist.

Donny Osmond

#42. Heller wrote Catch-22 in the evenings after work, sitting at the kitchen table in his Manhattan apartment.

Mason Currey

#43. They're not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?"
"Who else will go?

Joseph Heller

#44. Of course you're dying. We're all dying. Where the devil else do you think you're heading?

Joseph Heller

#45. Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.

Joseph Heller

#46. The night was full of horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts ...

Joseph Heller

#47. With a little ingenuity and vision, he had made it all but impossible for anyone in the squadron to talk to him, which was just fine with everyone, he noticed, since no one wanted to talk to him anyway.

Joseph Heller

#48. He smiled ostentatiously to show himself reasonable and nice. "I'm not saying that to be cruel and insulting," he continued with cruel and insulting delight.

Joseph Heller

#49. He was one of those people with lots of intelligence but no brains

Joseph Heller

#50. They were the most depressing group of people Yossarian had ever been with. They were always in high spirits.

Joseph Heller

#51. This stuff is better than cotton candy, really it is. It's made out of real cotton. Yossarian, you've got to help me make the men eat it. Egyptian cotton is the finest cotton in the world.

Joseph Heller

#52. The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been!

Joseph Heller

#53. To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

Joseph Heller

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

Joseph Heller

#55. The book was thick and red. It was almost thicker than it was wide, a thickness that somehow enhanced its bookishness. It was - to me aged 12 - quite clearly more of a book than most, if not all, of the paperbacks untidily stacked on the shelves of my father's study.

Will Self

#56. The awkwardness of getting reward in a well-off society is that the creation of appetite often requires undoing the work of satisfying appetite.

George Ainslie

#57. 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

#58. The spirit gone, man is garbage.

Joseph Heller

#59. We anticipate Time, and welcome it when birth comes in the door, then we hate Time and curse it, when death exits the door.

Anthony Liccione