No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.
From Joe Haldeman
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 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.
I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.
I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it.
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.
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.
Traveling anywhere in the world involves some risk. You could always opt to spend your life cowering under your bed.
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.
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.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives