Frederik Pohl quotes

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. (Frederik Pohl)
My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated. View quote
Frederik Pohl
Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Frederik Pohl
‘Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time-' That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. View quote
Frederik Pohl
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. View quote
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. View quote
Frederik Pohl
I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport. View quote
Frederik Pohl
People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research. View quote
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)
I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time. View quote
Frederik Pohl
I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Frederik Pohl
It was an appeal to reason, and they're always dangerous. You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it. View quote
Frederik Pohl
Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn't just consequence? I think, and I've thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, porducing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever. View quote
Frederik Pohl
Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears. View quote
Frederik Pohl
Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten. (Frederik Pohl)
I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements. Of course there wasn't anybody to send them to, but that didn't stop the Major. He said with determination: "Nobody's ever going to chew me out for noncompliance with regulations-even if I have to invent the regulations myself!”. View quote
Frederik Pohl
There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars. View quote
Frederik Pohl
He drew himself up and said with dignity: "We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: ‘Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.'”. View quote
Frederik Pohl
All of them had been so tested and retested that they had acquired considerable skill in answering test questions the way the examiners wanted them answered. View quote
Frederik Pohl