writer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, prose writer, autobiographer
1923 – 1999
I think Haig will be foolish, but perhaps not quite as foolish as Kissinger was, because Haig doesn't have the education Kissinger had. Haig is a little more dangerous because, I fear, he believes what he says, whereas I never got that impression from Kissinger.
When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, "Who has?"
Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts — and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.
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.
“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?”
Let someone else get killed!" "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.
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.
They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.
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 too 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.
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, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?
The 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.
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.
Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.
He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously.
The yellow moon turned orange and was soon red as the setting sun.
There was no way of knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of knowing anything.
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.
Gold was opposed to segregation and equally opposed to integration. Certainly he did not believe that women or homosexuals should suffer persecution or discrimination. On the other hand, he was privately opposed to all equal rights amendments, for he certainly did not want members of either group associating with him on levels of equality or familiarity.
Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use him no differently anyway.
The promises of maniacs, like those of women, are not safely relied upon.
I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life.
I think I may have been the first grown man in the world to fall truly, passionately, sexually, romantically and sentimentally in love. I practically invented it.
Didn't I once observe that there is nothing new under the sun?
Love is potent stuff, isn't it?
Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery or simple bad luck.
The wise man dies no better or more wisely than the fool. In what way, then, is the wise man wise?
He [God] owes me an apology too- at the very least. I'm not saying I shouldn't have been punished for those sins I committed. I'm saying that the punishments he chose were inhuman. I wonder what favor I'd want. I think I may be afraid to ask for it. I'm afraid He won't grant it. I'm more afraid that He will. Wouldn't it be tragic to find out that He really has been here all this time?
God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes on other people, doesn't He? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue so to speak, and levies upon them tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, then charges US for HIS error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is.
When one is infatuated, faults are endearing that in others would be heinous.
I am arrogant enough to wish I were modest as he and modest enough to know that this is arrogance.
Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?""That's all in your mind.
If character is destiny, the good are damned.
The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.
Nothing fails like success.
How dispiriting I find it, even after all my personal triumphs, that we must grow up and grow sad, that we must age, weaken, and in time go home to our long home in the ground, and that even golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.
No one who ever wants praise will be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And therefore I still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die.
He who steals my purse steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed. (Shakespeare's Othello said it first.)
Now THERE'S a hollow state to be in, isn't it — to believe in God and get no sign that He's there.
Everybody is as unstable as water.
The last thing any sensible human being should want is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us.
I'm not even sure we really had that much need for God as much as we did seem to have a need to believe in Him.
All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit.
If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?
Vanity. What's wrong with vanity? It doesn't satisfy.
The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth. Don't you know history?
I imagine that God Himself frequently wants to feel like a king. Why else would He create the world?
God is a murderer, imagine that. I told you I had the best story in the Bible, didn't I? I have always known that He was. Sooner or later He murders us all, doesn't He, and we go back to the dust from which we came. So I'm no longer scared to defy him. All He can do is kill me.
If the chance ever comes to you to fall in love, grab it, every time. You might always live to regret it, but you won't find anything to beat it, and you won't know if it will come to you once more.
Fools hate knowledge
There is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete and everybody is capable of everything
God had no need for Ecclesiastes to acquaint Him with vanity.
Anyone seeking public office was not worthy to hold it.
She knew Pota had a larger respect for personal privacy than he did for God, Congress, or the U.S. Constitution and never looked at anything there except, occasionally, for the remote control to the television set.
History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.
Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.
When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Rise above principle and do what's right.
He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
I've adjusted to this, that my books are not going to get unanimously good reviews.
We do have a zeal for laughter in most situations, give or take a dentist.
I had examined myself pretty thoroughly and discovered that I was unfit for military service.
But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.
All of my books deal in a very rough, rude fashion with subjects about which there are great conflicts of opinion.
I've only had four ideas for a novel in my life, and I've written all of them.
Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.
When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'
Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Never quit a job as a matter of principle. You'll always regret it.
Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.
I don't believe in miracles because it's been a long time since we've had any.
He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
I think in every country that there is at least one executive who is scared of going crazy.
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. 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.
I do not have, and never had, any interest in either the Bible or religion.
The idea of using actual clippings came about as a way of characterizing Gold. Gold uses clippings because he hates doing research and is not even really interested in the books and articles he writes.
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
The villains will come along. There were plenty in the Carter administration, and there will be plenty with Reagan.