Joe Haldeman Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.