Quotes from Frederik Pohl

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

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

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

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.

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

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 pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

His words were noble, even in such a cause. I hated the twisted minds who had done such a thing to a fine consumer like Gus. It was something like murder. He could have played his part in the world, buying and using and making work and profits for his brothers all around the globe, ever increasing his wants and needs, ever increasing everybody's work and profits in the circle of consumption, raising children to be consumers in turn. It hurt to see him perverted into a sterile zealot.

Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales.

I wasn't enjoying the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn't account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.

There is a possible slight confusion here that I should eliminate. Robinette (and all the rest of the human race) called these people Heechee. Of course, they didn't call themselves that, any more than native Americans called themselves Indians or the African Khoi-San tribes called themselves Hottentots and Bushmen. What the Heechee in fact called themselves was the intelligent ones. But that proves little. So does Homo sapiens.

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.

which is commonly understood to mean that everything is relative to something else excepting only the velocity of light.

that is a measure of how much you and the planet Earth attract each other;