Joseph Heller Quotes

I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author.

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

If everything was good, maybe I wouldn't have a career. I wouldn't have anything to make fun of.

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.

The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.

I think when you do comedy, you play by a different set of rules. No one really wants you to be in that good shape. Being in good shape implies a level of vanity that isn't necessarily funny.

A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

The 'Phoenix Sun' did a list of the unsexiest men in the world, and I made it to number one. I beat out Bin Laden. He's a terrorist, hasn't bathed in months. I beat him out. To me it was a great honor.

A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

I understand being less sexy than Osama bin Laden, but not less sexy than Carrot Top. That, I find offensive.

Read Don Quixote; it is a very good book; I still read it frequently.

It's not good for comedy to be like, 'Thanks for liking me.' Being popular is poison.

Boxing was the only career where I wouldn't have to start out at the bottom. I had a good resume.

I've been joking that 'On the Road' is the prequel to 'The Road.' I don't know if that's a very good joke.

It's good just to laugh sometimes, and if it comes out of some truth, it's even stronger.

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

If you ask who I aspire to, well, if a single line of mine was as funny as P. G. Wodehouse can be, that would be great.

I'm looking more like my dogs every day - it must be the shaggy fringe and the ears.

I did as well as might be expected—seated as I was between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.

I won the Nobel prize for literature. What was your crime?

I make Jessica Simpson look like a rock scientist.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

I do believe that on a whole, women are definitely smarter than men... I also believe that dogs are smarter than women. No? That one, you don't believe it? You believe that I didn't do a series of tests? You are right to not believe it, because I'm going to go ahead and admit that I do not believe what I just said, it was what's described as a 'joke.' Um, I'll be telling a bunch of them here tonight.