Quotes from Frederik Pohl

Only you have to keep practicing and remembering.

If a picture on the wall can remember, you remember that this is not the first time. If a picture on the wall can know things, you know that he has tried to leap out of that window before, and he is about to try again. He is trying to kill himself. He has tried nine times in the past fifty days. If a picture on the wall can regret, you regret this. It is a terrible waste for this man to keep trying to kill himself, since he does not at all want to die.

How long the party lasted Forrester did not know. He remembered a long harangue in which the drunken ballet dancer was trying to explain to him that the accent was Martian, not German; something to do with six-hundred-millibar oxyhelium air, which got them out of the habit of hearing certain frequencies.

But meanwhile my store-bought arteries were slowly hardening, and every day six thousand cells were dying in my irreplaceable brain; and meanwhile stars slowed in their flight and the universe dragged itself toward its ultimate entropic death, and meanwhile - Meanwhile everything, if you stopped to think of it, was skidding downhill. And I never gave any of it a thought.

Es extremadamente listo, considerando lo estúpido que es.

Rafiniert ist der Herr Hietschie, aber böshaft ist er nicht.

Maybe there is a sort of law of conservation of misery that insures an average quantum value of unhappiness for every human being, and all we can really do is spread it in one direction or another?

Every retreat is a kind of funeral cortège, and the thing that has died is confidence.

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.

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.

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

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.

You asked me, 'Do you call this living?" And I answer: Yes, it is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.

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.