Joe Haldeman
45 quotes
Biography
"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."
"Most aliens in science fiction aren’t truly alien, and that’s not because science fiction writers lack imagination, but because the purpose of an alien in a story is usually to provide a meaningful distortion of human nature."
"Any time somebody starts out a sentence with your name, Leonard thought, they’re trying to sell you something."
"“I’ll be frank with you.” Leonard reflected that that was one of the least trust-inspiring phrases in the language."
"It was full of jargon, charts and the kind of vague mathematics that social scientists admire."
"One class of crackpots felt that Harrison had betrayed humanity, giving conquering hordes of aliens a road map back to Earth. The details of what they would do to us, and why, provided an interesting refraction of the individual crackpot’s problems."
"“The problem with most people,” Samuel cut in, “isn’t that they don’t know a lot of things. Just that most of what they know is wrong.”"
"YOU ARE VERY SUPERSTITIOUS. I HAVE FOUND THIS TO BE NOT UNCOMMON AMONG MATHEMATICIANS."
"A person who thinks he learns science from science fiction is like one who thinks he learns history from historical novels, and he deserves what he gets."
"Key West is lousy with writers, mostly poor writers, in one sense of that word or the other."
"A good writer remembered everything and then forgot it when he sat down to write, and reinvented it so the writing would be more real than the memory. Experience was important, but imagination was more important."
"Nothing is simple. The only thing that’s simple is that nothing is simple."
"Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction."
"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."
"She hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head."
"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."
"I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice“ had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live."
"It was making me a little queasy. 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."
"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."
"Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems."
"“We’re inferring from an absence of data,” Jacque said. “That’s lousy science.”"
"Maybe after the war we’ll be civilized again. That’s the way it has always happened in the past."
"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."
"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."
"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."