Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller
Joseph Hellerwas an American satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. The title of one of his works, Catch-22, entered the English lexicon, to refer to a vicious circle, wherein an absurd, no-win, contradictory choice, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice is a bureaucratic, or legal impossibility for artificial reasons, and hence, then regardless of the chosen option, a paradoxically negative outcome is a certainty. Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other works...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 May 1923
CountryUnited States of America
Joseph Heller quotes about
My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
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.
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.
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.
When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as ""Catch-22"" I'm tempted to reply, ""Who has?
When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.
I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly.
So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?
There is no disappointment so numbing...as someone no better than you achieving more.
He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.