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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Science fiction is the very literature of change.

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.

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.