Joe Haldeman Quotes

I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day-
Mandella - wake up, goddammit, your shift!

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

This world was no place for anyone with access to another.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

I die. O my hair falls out and my flesh rots and my bones are cracked by the hungry ta!a'an. He drops me behind him all around the forest and nothing will grow where his excrement from my marrow falls. As the years pass the forest dies from the poison of my remains. The soil washes into the sean and poisons the fish and all die. O the embarrassment.

... then unleashed Stargate's 18 sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom and law...

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.'

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 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.

-I die. Before I die my body turns hair-side-in. People come from everywhere to see the insides of themselves. But the sight makes them lose the will, and all die. O the embarrassment.

Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it.

I've always thought the pre-Revolutionary system was more elegant, but it did concentrate too much power in the hands of one person. Keyes says that at least you knew who the man was then. The person who represents a Lobby in Congress is never the one who makes the real decisions; the real leaders are rarely identifiable and are never held responsible for their actions. If a puppet gets in trouble they sacrifice him and haul out another. I don't doubt that that's true, at least some of the time, but it's certainly not the whole story. If a Lobby consistently acts against the public interest, its voting power dwindles away. Keyes says that's a cynical illusion: all the polls reflect is how much money a Lobby has put into advertising.

You live, you die, they throw you on the compost heap. Then you live again, without the inconvenience of consciousness.

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

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.

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.

Reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

[H]is skin was the color of age and his features the shape of a saint's.

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

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.

I die. I breathe in and breahe in and cannot exhale. I explode all over my friends. They forget my name and pretend it is dung. They wash off in the square and the well becomes polluted. All die. O the embarrassment.

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

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

Oriental marionette imitating an occidental gesture.

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

But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told!

I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it'd be Sean. But even she couldn't.

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.

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor's credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.

She said she promised her mother that she would never drink a drop of wine. That was the drop she never drank.

But I decided that buying the gift was more for me than for her, anyhow. A commercial kind of substitute for prayer.

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

You can't make a date in death's dateless night.

The brain isn't very much like a computer, although it doesn't do a bad job, considering that it's built by unskilled labor and programmed more by pure chance than anything else.

One rash person in the right place and earth could be a sterile cinder in seconds, but that's been more-or-less true for a century.

A square meter of earth, Dostoevski said; if all you had was a square meter of earth to stand on, and nothing around you but impenetrable fog, living would be preferable to dying.

There may or may not be a God, but if there is one, I wouldn't want to have him over for dinner.

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

Have you had your first baby yet? I might have one myself, once they find a way for the man to carry it around the first nine months.

different. Warmer.' He paused to let that soak

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

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.

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.

Saul's vitals were not human, but familiar:
he never told me he was from another world:
I never told him I was from his future.

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

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

I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn't let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond.

Anyone who sees clearly sees chaos everywhere. Art is a way of temporarily setting order to confusion. Temporary and incomplete; that's why we never run out of new art. Anyone who comes to the tools of art without that sense of confusion is an invader.

Well, there's always Nevada," Benny said. "You can buy anything from a hand laser to an atom bomb there.