Frederik Pohl Quotes

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Science fiction is the very literature of change.

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

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.

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

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.