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

Joseph Heller

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Joseph Heller
Age: 76 †
Born: 1923
Born: May 1
Died: 1999
Died: December 10
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Good
Tempted
Catch
Saying
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Anything
Done
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He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
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When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
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It made him proud that 29 months in the service had not blunted his genius for ineptitude.
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Insanity is contagious.
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What do you do when it rains? The captain answered frankly. I get wet.
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mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.
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What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.
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I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning
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Well, he died. You don't get any older than that.
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Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.
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The enemy, retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.
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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.
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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. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
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From men motivated by moral certitude, history teaches, no lasting good ever comes.
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It is the anonymous they, the enigmatic they who are in charge. Who is they? I don't know. Nobody knows. Not even they themselves.
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When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.
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I don't understand the process of imagination-though I know that I am very much at its mercy.
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I don't believe in miracles because it's been a long time since we've had any.
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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.
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Rise above principal and do what's right.
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