Quotes from 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.

But they weren't aliens, I had to remind myself — we were.

The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth's economy would collapse.

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

I called to the waiter, 'bring me one of those Antares things.' Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Most science fiction is about white men who are 25 to 30, who are very smart, who face a physical problem and solve it.

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.

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

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

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

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