Joseph Heller Quotes

You never know why something works or doesn't.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

I say the one thing about luck is you can't really count on it.

Nothing is a guarantee at all.

Success is unpredictable and fragile.

Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get rained out.

The world runs on luck.

It's a losers' game to try and guess, it really is.

I've never been able to predict the future of anything.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

My life is a big accident, so where I end up, I think it's all accidents.

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

The affairs of this world are so shifting and depend on so many accidents, that it is hard to form any judgment concerning the future; nay, we see from experience that the forecasts even of the wise almost always turn out false.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

You write a hit the same way you write a flop.

Much of what we do in life has a huge component of luck.

You know, the music business is like the Lotto. Just put your numbers down and sometimes they hit, and sometimes they don't. There's just no rhyme or reason.

I never predict anything, and I never will.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

The worst possible turn can not be programmed. It is caused by coincidence.

When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.