Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman
Joe William Haldemanis an American science fiction author. He is best known for his 1974 novel The Forever War. That novel, and other of his works including The Hemingway Hoaxand Forever Peace, have won major science fiction awards including the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. For his career writing science fiction and/or fantasy he is a SFWA Grand Master and since 2012 a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth9 June 1943
CountryUnited States of America
All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.
Don't 'write what you know.' Make up something new!
There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.
The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.
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.
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.
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.
Most science fiction is about white men who are 25 to 30, who are very smart, who face a physical problem and solve it.
Traveling anywhere in the world involves some risk. You could always opt to spend your life cowering under your bed.
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.
No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger.
Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.
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.
No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.