Frederik Pohl Quotes

#1. You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.

Frederik Pohl

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.

Frederik Pohl

#5. A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Frederik Pohl

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.

Frederik Pohl

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

Frederik Pohl

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.

Frederik Pohl

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Frederik Pohl

#21. 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

#22. For someone to be taken seriously it was valuable to have the appearance of someone who deserved to be taken seriously.

Frederik Pohl

#23. I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

Frederik Pohl

#24. Science fiction is the very literature of change.

Frederik Pohl

#25. The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

Frederik Pohl

#26. But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words.

Frederik Pohl

#27. 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

#28. It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

Frederik Pohl

#29. 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

#30. My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.

Frederik Pohl

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. Only you have to keep practicing and remembering.

Frederik Pohl

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

Frederik Pohl

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

Frederik Pohl

#44. What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?

Frederik Pohl

#45. 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

#46. She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now! I can't live with that.

Frederik Pohl