Frederik Pohl Quotes

30 quotes in 449 categories

• 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…
• What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?
• You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.
• You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.
• 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…
• I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.
• 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…
• 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…
• I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.
• The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
• 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…
• In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.
• 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…
• It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
• 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…
• My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is…
• I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.
• People as me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
• My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.
• 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…

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