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.
Most science fiction is about white men who are 25 to 30, who are very smart, who face a physical problem and solve it.
Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.
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.
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.
Traveling anywhere in the world involves some risk. You could always opt to spend your life cowering under your bed.
No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.
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 any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.
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.
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 like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction.
I carry a notebook and write down things to do, and I write out thoughts and stuff like that.
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.
No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger.
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.'
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.
