Joseph Heller quotes

" I intend to live forever or die trying. " # Death and Dying

" "The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on." " # Enemies

" Every writer I know has trouble writing. " # Writers and Writing

" He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt. " # Immortality # Death and Dying # Love

" Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them. " # Greatness # Mediocrity # Achievement

" When I grow up I want to be a little boy. " # Age and Aging

" Nothing fails like success. " # Success

" How ironic the difference between me and my young son Absalom, between his soliciting the soundest means of overtaking me and having my life, while I was cudgeling my brains for a way to spare his. "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom," were my mawkish words to my commanders as their men trooped past me toward the positions they would take up in the field outside the wood of Ephraim for the battle in which he would die. "Beware that none touch the young man Absalom," I urged like a fool. No, not like a fool, but like a fond, doting father who will overlook and excuse everything in the child he loves best, and who breaks his heart. And in that singular disparity in our desires abides his lasting victory over me: I loved him and he did not love me. " # Poetry and Poets # Love # Life and Living

" I tend to be a skeptic, I don't like dogmatic approaches by anybody. I don't like intolerance and a dogmatic person is intolerant of other people. It's one of the reasons I keep a distance from all religious beliefs. I think in this country and in Australia too there's a late intolerance in most religions, an intolerance, a part that could easily become persecutions. " # Friends and Friendship # Skepticism # Religion

" 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. " # Luck # Love # Destiny