Joseph Heller Quotes

I am arrogant enough to wish I were modest as he and modest enough to know that this is arrogance.

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

There is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete and everybody is capable of everything

Fools hate knowledge

Everybody is as unstable as water.

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.

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

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 truth is whatever people will believe is the truth. Don't you know history?

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

Didn't I once observe that there is nothing new under the sun?

Vanity. What's wrong with vanity? It doesn't satisfy.

If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?

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.

There’s a big cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard. Someone comes up to this writer, I think it’s Joseph Heller, and says, “Joe, see that guy over there? He’s a hedge fund manager, and he made more money yesterday than you made on all the books you have ever published.” Heller looks over, pauses, and says, “Yeah, but I have something he’ll never have: enough.”