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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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