Joseph Heller Quotes

I am fascinated, I suppose, by a flawed man with a streak of greatness.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

People are composed of many things, and in my work, what influences me is the complexity of people - the chiaroscuro of dark and light. When I play a strong guy, I try to find, where is he weak? And, conversely, when I play a weak guy, where is he strong?

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

There's so much saint in the worst of them, and so much devil in the best of them, that a woman who's married to one of them, has nothing to learn of the rest of them.

We make assumptions: nurses should be nice, teachers should be good. But everyone has a dark side, some darker than others.

Science merely amplifies the capabilities of human beings. Science gives us the ability to do ill and to do good more than we had, and to question science in this respect is like questioning whether people ought to have two hands or just one, because with two hands they could do more evil than they can with just one.

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see figures from the past as caricatures - either all good or all bad - when the truth is always much more complex.

I am a man who is noble. I have a good heart, but at the same time, I'm a little malicioso. There's no way of hiding that side.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

I was not interested in doing the plot of Oedipus in blackface. I did wonder, what would these people have been like if they hadn't been in that situation?... One could look at Oedipus, or at my character Augustus, as a cynical schemer who did everything because he was hungry for power. But that's just too easy. I'm more interested in how humans can embody conflicting goals and emotions.

I love ambiguity. People are that way. People are very hard to work out. No one is just strong or just fragile, or anything like that.

No one should dogmatize about the capacity of human nature for degradation or exaltation.

Even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.

What I’m interested in are tools that can assist people to do the things they’re really good at.

I love people, 'cause people are so smart. People have done a lot of great things.

I don't believe that relationships are fixed things. People are necessarily complex and confused beings. We don't always do the right thing, say the right, and behave the same way or the way we always want to behave.

I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

Sometimes people are good, and they do just what they should. But the very same people who are good sometimes are the very same people who are bad sometimes. It's funny but it's true. Its the same isn't it, for me and . . .

Good people can do terrible things, and that's what life is all about, the complexities and grey areas. And often characters aren't written that way in movies, especially characters for women. So you end up being either one thing or the other.

They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.

Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most.

Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man.