Joe Haldeman Quotes
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Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn’t true.
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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.
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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.
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'You’re actually a soldier,' he said to me, 'and you go along with this foolishness?''I didn’t ask to be a soldier. And I can’t imagine a peace as foolish as this war we’re in.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.
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Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.
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I carry a notebook and write down things to do, and I write out thoughts and stuff like that.
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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.
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It was an ideological war for some-the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.
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Most science fiction is about white men who are 25 to 30, who are very smart, who face a physical problem and solve it.
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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.
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'Everybody rich and happy.' She smiled. 'Also complacent and rather stupid, you may have noticed.'
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We did it with their government’s foreknowledge and permission, of course-and there were no civilian casualties, equally of course. Once they’re dead they’re rebels.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.
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I never found anyone else and I don’t want anyone else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.
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CAROL: You don’t care for the music?JACQUE: Music! It’s just a gimmick to sell lutes and flutes.
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If you asked him, he would say the only connection between free will and religion in his life was the fact that he hadn’t set foot in a synagogue since he turned eighteen.
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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.