Frederik Pohl famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Jam #Fiction #Stories
You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.
-- Frederik Pohl
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

#Real #Fiction #Literature
My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.
-- Frederik Pohl

#Cheating #Firsts #Cigarette
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

#Fiction #Stories #Magazines
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

#Writing #Trying #Rays
It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
-- Frederik Pohl

#Population #Fiction #Science Fiction
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

#Thinking #Doe #Scientific Method
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

#Different #Fiction #Literature
I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.
-- Frederik Pohl

#Sports #Book #Pleasure
People as me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
-- Frederik Pohl

#Writing #People #Fiction
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

#Life #Thinking #People
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

#Science #Thinking #Curves
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
-- Frederik Pohl

#Fiction #Dissection #Method
I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.
-- Frederik Pohl

#Catholic #Fiction #Science Fiction
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

#Giving Up #Two #Choices
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

#Girl #Boys #Years
What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?
-- Frederik Pohl

#Heart #Light #Years
You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.
-- Frederik Pohl

#Long #Reason #Profession
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

#Morning #Block #Typewriters
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

#Writing #Thinking #People
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

#New Day #Development #Four
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.
-- Frederik Pohl

#Mean #Looks #Stories
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

#Life #Diploma #Graduates

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