Top 81 Joe Haldeman Quotes
#1. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
Joe Haldeman
#2. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#3. You can't make a date in death's dateless night.
Joe Haldeman
#4. A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.
Joe Haldeman
#5. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#6. Well, there's always Nevada," Benny said. "You can buy anything from a hand laser to an atom bomb there.
Joe Haldeman
#7. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#8. I'm not quite Machiavellian enough to set him up, but if he strays too close to the edge I might give him a nudge.
Joe Haldeman
#9. Don't worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.
Joe Haldeman
#10. I have a radical thought," Meryl said. "Instead of heading for the hills with guns, why don't we try to find something like the Red Cross, and volunteer. Try to do something constructive.
Joe Haldeman
#11. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained.
Joe Haldeman
#12. I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction.
Joe Haldeman
#13. No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger.
Joe Haldeman
#14. Don't 'write what you know.' Make up something new!
Joe Haldeman
#15. -I die. I,uh, have a terrible fever in my head and it gets hotter and hotter and hotter until my head is a fire, a forge, a star. I set the world on fire and everybody dies. O the embarrassment.
Joe Haldeman
#16. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#17. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#18. 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?
Joe Haldeman
#19. Marianne, how's your statistics?" "Math is my worst subject." "But you can program?" "Of course. I'm not illiterate.
Joe Haldeman
#20. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#21. We're headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid. New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.
Joe Haldeman
#22. Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.
Joe Haldeman
#23. Traveling anywhere in the world involves some risk. You could always opt to spend your life cowering under your bed.
Joe Haldeman
#24. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#25. -I die. My footprints are cursed. I walk around the village not knowing that all who cross where I have been will stay in estrous zero and bear no young. Eventually all die. O the embarrassment.
Joe Haldeman
#26. But I remember another image from Earth: the rich dark green grass that grew in graveyards.
Joe Haldeman
#27. Reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.
Joe Haldeman
#28. I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it.
Joe Haldeman
#29. -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.
Joe Haldeman
#30. Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.
Joe Haldeman
#31. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#32. I carry a notebook and write down things to do, and I write out thoughts and stuff like that.
Joe Haldeman
#33. This world was no place for anyone with access to another.
Joe Haldeman
#34. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#35. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#36. Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.
Joe Haldeman
#37. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#38. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#39. 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.'
Joe Haldeman
#40. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#41. Our country use satellites to spy on its own people?'
'Well, the satellites go all around the world. They just don't bother to turn them off over the US.
Joe Haldeman
#42. different. Warmer.' He paused to let that soak
Joe Haldeman
#43. You live, you die, they throw you on the compost heap. Then you live again, without the inconvenience of consciousness.
Joe Haldeman
#44. All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.
Joe Haldeman
#45. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#47. I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed for a minute and I wound up with the couch
Joe Haldeman
#48. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#50. But I decided that buying the gift was more for me than for her, anyhow. A commercial kind of substitute for prayer.
Joe Haldeman
#51. He's asleep in the harbor, disguised as dog shit.
Joe Haldeman
#52. Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.
Joe Haldeman
#53. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#54. She said she promised her mother that she would never drink a drop of wine. That was the drop she never drank.
Joe Haldeman
#56. People had written about that, warfare based on attrition of wealth rather than loss of life. But it's always been easier to make new lives than new wealth.
Joe Haldeman
#57. The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.
Joe Haldeman
#58. Oriental marionette imitating an occidental gesture.
Joe Haldeman
#59. There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.
Joe Haldeman
#60. That meant that he'd drunk too much too early, and had popped an Alcoterm to burn it off.
Joe Haldeman
#61. Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.
Joe Haldeman
#62. Rationalism doesn't require "belief," only observation. The real, measurable world doesn't care what you believe.
Joe Haldeman
#63. Perhaps all great loves are that, a secret that can't be shared.
Joe Haldeman
#64. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#65. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#66. Heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.
Joe Haldeman
#67. Politicians cover their mistakes with money; cooks cover their mistakes with mayonnaise; doctors cover theirs with dirt.
Joe Haldeman
#68. Most science fiction is about white men who are 25 to 30, who are very smart, who face a physical problem and solve it.
Joe Haldeman
#69. No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.
Joe Haldeman
#70. -This is embarrassing. I uh, die and, um the last breath from my lungs is a terrible acid. It melts the seaward wall of the city and a hurricane comes and washes it away. All die. O the embarrassment
-You're much better at that than he was.
Joe Haldeman
#71. Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust.
Joe Haldeman
#72. On Earth, we'd just use glue, but here the only fluid was helium, which has lots of interesting properties, but is definitely not sticky.
Joe Haldeman
#73. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#74. I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.
Joe Haldeman
#75. In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day's horrors, I found that I really didn't give a shit.
Joe Haldeman
#76. [H]is skin was the color of age and his features the shape of a saint's.
Joe Haldeman
#77. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#78. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#79. Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.
Joe Haldeman
#80. 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.
Joe Haldeman
#81. [Spielberg and I] had a disagreement over what God was ... He thought God was Stephen Spielberg, but that thought had never occurred to me.
Joe Haldeman
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