Frederik Pohl Quotes & Sayings

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. — Frederik Pohl

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time. — Frederik Pohl

You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it. — Frederik Pohl

And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing. — Frederik Pohl

The bump of ego on his skull had swollen large, so he saw the whole world in terms of what it could give him. — Frederik Pohl

Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die. — Frederik Pohl

For someone to be taken seriously it was valuable to have the appearance of someone who deserved to be taken seriously. — Frederik Pohl

I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read. — Frederik Pohl

I wasn't enjoying the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn't account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me. — Frederik Pohl

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette. — Frederik Pohl

When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating. — Frederik Pohl

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. — Frederik Pohl

What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts? — Frederik Pohl

I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them. — Frederik Pohl

That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens. — Frederik Pohl

It isn't a matter of what's rational or justified, it is a matter of signals. It was the wrong signal to give me. The reason wolves don't kill each other off is that the smaller and weaker wolf always surrenders. It rolls over, bares its throat and puts its paws in the air to signal that it is beaten. When that happens the winner is physically unable to attack anymore. If it were not that way, there wouldn't be any wolves left. For the same reason men don't usually kill women, or not by beating them to death. They can't. However much he wants to hit her, his internal machinery vetoes it. But if the woman makes the mistake of giving him a different signal by hitting him first. — Frederik Pohl

On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story. — Frederik Pohl

A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas. — Frederik Pohl

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck. — Frederik Pohl

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want. — Frederik Pohl

But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words. — Frederik Pohl

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport. — Frederik Pohl

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true ... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you. — Frederik Pohl

Only you have to keep practicing and remembering. — Frederik Pohl

The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty."
Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely. — Frederik Pohl

She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now! I can't live with that. — Frederik Pohl

I was worried about sex," he went on. "But you know what, Sulie? It's like being told I can't have any caviar for the next couple years. I don't even like caviar. And when you come right down to it, I don't want sex right now. I supposed you punched that into the computer? 'Cut down sex drive, increase euphoria'? Anyway, it finally penetrated my little brain that I was just making trouble for myself, worrying about whether I could get along without something I really didn't want. It's a reflection of what I think other people think I should want. — Frederik Pohl

Science fiction is the very literature of change. — Frederik Pohl

Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad. — Frederik Pohl

You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb. — Frederik Pohl

Cornut knew that that was what the immortals wanted. They had kept their herd of contended, helpless, shortlived cattle long enough. The herd had prospered until it competed with its unseen owners for food and space. Like any good husbandman, the immortals had decided to thin the herd out. — Frederik Pohl

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever ... and the other one scared me out of my mind. — Frederik Pohl

You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens. — Frederik Pohl

You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it. — Frederik Pohl

When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara — Frederik Pohl

The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it's like retiring. — Frederik Pohl

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. — Frederik Pohl

A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction. — Frederik Pohl

I let myself flop - so gently, so slowly - into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe. — Frederik Pohl

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research. — Frederik Pohl

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method. — Frederik Pohl

The FDA just ordered them off the market. The glaze is supposed to be poison - provided you drink at least forty cups of tea out of one of them every day of your life for twenty years. — Frederik Pohl

It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations. — Frederik Pohl

That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have. — Frederik Pohl

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction. — Frederik Pohl

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great). — Frederik Pohl

My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated. — Frederik Pohl

The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten. — Frederik Pohl

Wealth ... or death. Those were the choices Gateway offered. Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; others returned with their remains
barely identifiable. It was the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there was no shortage of desperate. — Frederik Pohl

That was an all-purpose IBM 3070. It took up half a room and still did not have enough capacity to do all the jobs demanded of it. — Frederik Pohl

You asked me, 'Do you call this living? And I answer: Yes, it is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much. — Frederik Pohl

For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody. — Frederik Pohl

In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it. — Frederik Pohl