Top 37 Quotes & Sayings by Joe Haldeman

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Joe Haldeman.

Last updated on April 19, 2025.

Joe William Haldeman is an American science fiction author. He is best known for his novel The Forever War (1974). That novel and other works, including The Hemingway Hoax (1991) and Forever Peace (1997), have won science fiction awards, including the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. He was awarded the SFWA Grand Master for career achievements. In 2012 he was inducted as a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Many of Haldeman's works, including his debut novel War Year and his second novel The Forever War, were inspired by his experiences in the Vietnam War. Wounded in combat, he struggled to adjust to civilian life after returning home. From 1983 to 2014, he was a professor teaching writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

American - Author | Born: June 9, 1943

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it.

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

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

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

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

Joe Haldeman

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

Joe Haldeman

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.

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

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

Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Haldeman

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

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

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

Joe Haldeman

Top 37 Quotes & Sayings by Joe Haldeman

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