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"You still have time."

"I'm not sure if you're joking or not."

"Neither am I," Yossarian told him. "But if you can delay the decision of what you want to do with your life until you're old enough to retire, you will never have to make it."

"I still can't tell if you're joking."

"I'm still not always sure either," Yossarian answered. "Sometimes I mean what I say and don't mean it at the same time. Tell me, my apple of my eye, do you think in my checkered history I ever really wanted to do any of the work I found myself doing?"

"Not even the film scripts?"

"Not really and not for long. That was make-believe and didn't last, and I wasn't that crazy about the finished products there either. Do you think I wanted to go into advertising, or Wall Street, or ever get busy with things like land development or puts and calls? Whoever starts out with a dream to succeed in public relations?"

"Did you really once work for Noodles Cook?"

"Noodles Cook worked for me. Soon after college. Do you think we really wanted to write political speeches, Noodles Cook and I? We wanted to write plays and be published in The New Yorker. Whoever has much choice? We take the best we can get, Michael, not what enraptures us. Even the Prince of Wales."

"That's a hell of a way to live, Dad, isn't it?"

"It's the way we have to."

Michael was silent a minute. "I got scared when I saw that No Visitors sign on your door," he confessed in a mild tone of injury. "Who the hell put it up? I began to think you might really be sick."

"It's my idea of a joke," mumbled Yossarian, who had added to the sign with a brush-point pen the notice that violators would be shot. "It helps keep people out. They just keep popping in all day long without even telephoning. They don't seem to realize that lying around in a hospital all day can be pretty demanding work."

"You never answer your telephone anyway. I bet you're the only patient here with an answering machine. How much longer are you going to stay?"

"Is the mayor still the mayor? The cardinal st

ill the cardinal? Is that prick still in office?"

"What prick?"

"Whatever prick is in office. I want all pricks out."

"You can't stay here that long!" cried Michael. "What the hell are you doing here anyway? You had your annual workup only a couple of months ago. Everyone thinks you're crazy."

"I object. Who does?"

"I do."

"You're crazy."

"We all do."

"I object again. You're all crazy."

"Julian says you could have taken over the whole company a long time ago if you had any ambition and brains."

"He's crazy too. Michael, this time I was scared. I had a vision.

"Of what?"

"It wasn't of taking over M & M. I had an aura, or thought I did, and was afraid I was having a seizure or a tumor, and I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or not. When I'm bored I get anxious. I get things like conjunctivitis and athlete's foot. I don't sleep well. You won't believe this, Michael, but when I'm not in love I'm bored, and I'm not in love."

"I can tell," said Michael. "You're not on a diet."

"Is that how you know?"