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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.