J.E. Haldeman Quotes

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.

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

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

Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in.

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

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

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

You cant put the toothpaste back in the tube.

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

Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

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.

It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.

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

We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.

Martyrs have been sincere. And so have tyrants. Wise men have been sincere. And so have fools.

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

[Spielberg and I] had a disagreement over what God was....He thought God was Stephen Spielberg, but that thought had never occurred to me.

Don't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the statements of preachers. And you will understand that God is the most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction.

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

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 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.

To proclaim himself an agnostic, while to some it might appear more respectable and cautious, would be to say in effect that he hadn't decided what to believe.

Why should an atheist pay more taxes so that a church which he despises should pay no taxes? That's a fair question. How can the apologists for the church exemption answer it?

Theism tells men that they are the slaves of a God. Atheism assures men that they are the investigators and users of nature.

To be true to the mythical conception of a God is to be false to the interests of mankind.

A good title is a work of a genius!

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

I dare us to give up – maybe we’ll reach nirvana by the time we’re sixty.

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

Table of Contents

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

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.

There's a place for farts, and there's a place for sharts.

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.

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.