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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

Table of Contents

He's asleep in the harbor, disguised as dog shit.

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.

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.