Joe Haldeman Quotations

One hopes that they'll never be able to use mind control weapons, because we're all done for if that happens. I don't want military people, or political people, to have that type of power over those of us who just get by from day to day.

No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.

No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger.

Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.

Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don't think I'd enjoy being in the same room with him. He's not my kind of person.

I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it.

I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.

Most science fiction is about white men who are 25 to 30, who are very smart, who face a physical problem and solve it.

Traveling anywhere in the world involves some risk. You could always opt to spend your life cowering under your bed.

When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.

There's something special about writing by hand, writing with a fountain pen, and there's something special about writing into a book, to take a blank book and turn it into an actual book.

It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.'

I met Heinlein after 'The Forever War' had won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He shook my hand and said he loved the book so much, he'd read it three times.

I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction.

I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.

If I had had a thing like an iPad when I was a kid, then I never would have gotten into the habit of writing things down by hand.

I carry a notebook and write down things to do, and I write out thoughts and stuff like that.

You'd have to put yourself back in the 1960s to understand how separate from the mainstream of American life soldiers felt themselves to be, because we knew that students and others were demonstrating pretty violently against what we were doing.

Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.

A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.

One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.

Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

Rationalism doesn't require "belief," only observation. The real, measurable world doesn't care what you believe.

One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures—dozens, literally dozens of factors.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there…the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.

[Spielberg and I] had a disagreement over what God was....He thought God was Stephen Spielberg, but that thought had never occurred to me.

Don't 'write what you know.' Make up something new!

Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.

The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate. Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?

The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.

Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.

Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.