Joe Haldeman Quotes & Sayings

You live, you die, they throw you on the compost heap. Then you live again, without the inconvenience of consciousness. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

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

But I decided that buying the gift was more for me than for her, anyhow. A commercial kind of substitute for prayer. — Joe Haldeman

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

I die. O my hair falls out and my flesh rots and my bones are cracked by the hungry ta!a'an. He drops me behind him all around the forest and nothing will grow where his excrement from my marrow falls. As the years pass the forest dies from the poison of my remains. The soil washes into the sean and poisons the fish and all die. O the embarrassment. — Joe Haldeman

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

Reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

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

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

I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it. — Joe Haldeman

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

So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium. — Joe Haldeman

I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is. — Joe Haldeman

I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day-
Mandella - wake up, goddammit, your shift! — Joe Haldeman

War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. — Joe Haldeman

Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them. — Joe Haldeman

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

I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed for a minute and I wound up with the couch — Joe Haldeman

the Aleph-Null campaign. — Joe Haldeman

Marianne, how's your statistics?" "Math is my worst subject." "But you can program?" "Of course. I'm not illiterate. — Joe Haldeman

She said she promised her mother that she would never drink a drop of wine. That was the drop she never drank. — Joe Haldeman

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

You couldn't blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans' having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored. The fact was, Earth's economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it. The — Joe Haldeman

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

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. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

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

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

I carry a notebook and write down things to do, and I write out thoughts and stuff like that. — Joe Haldeman

No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger. — Joe Haldeman

Traveling anywhere in the world involves some risk. You could always opt to spend your life cowering under your bed. — Joe Haldeman

That meant that he'd drunk too much too early, and had popped an Alcoterm to burn it off. — Joe Haldeman

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

Christ and Buddha, — Joe Haldeman

This world was no place for anyone with access to another. — Joe Haldeman

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

Politicians cover their mistakes with money; cooks cover their mistakes with mayonnaise; doctors cover theirs with dirt. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

But I remember another image from Earth: the rich dark green grass that grew in graveyards. — Joe Haldeman

-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

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

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

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

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

But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told! — Joe Haldeman

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

-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

Heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

Perhaps all great loves are that, a secret that can't be shared. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

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

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor's credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint. — Joe Haldeman

Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet. — Joe Haldeman

Well, there's always Nevada," Benny said. "You can buy anything from a hand laser to an atom bomb there. — Joe Haldeman

Table of Contents — Joe Haldeman

[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

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

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

Don't worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket. — Joe Haldeman

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. — Joe Haldeman

-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

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

I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

I've always thought the pre-Revolutionary system was more elegant, but it did concentrate too much power in the hands of one person. Keyes says that at least you knew who the man was then. The person who represents a Lobby in Congress is never the one who makes the real decisions; the real leaders are rarely identifiable and are never held responsible for their actions. If a puppet gets in trouble they sacrifice him and haul out another. I don't doubt that that's true, at least some of the time, but it's certainly not the whole story. If a Lobby consistently acts against the public interest, its voting power dwindles away. Keyes says that's a cynical illusion: all the polls reflect is how much money a Lobby has put into advertising. — Joe Haldeman

Oriental marionette imitating an occidental gesture. — Joe Haldeman

[H]is skin was the color of age and his features the shape of a saint's. — Joe Haldeman

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

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

different. Warmer.' He paused to let that soak — Joe Haldeman

-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