Quotes from Frederik Pohl

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

I'm so busy listening to the heart that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.

And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing.

The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty." Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely.

The bump of ego on his skull had swollen large, so he saw the whole world in terms of what it could give him.

She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now! I can't live with that.

Four thousand A.U. plus is a long trip-and that's as the crow flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires, because of course there aren't a lot of crows in near-interstellar space.

There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.

It is not a cheap commodity, love. Some of us can have it and never face the bill, but only if someone else picks up the check.

The difference between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense.

Cornut knew that that was what the immortals wanted. They had kept their herd of contended, helpless, shortlived cattle long enough. The herd had prospered until it competed with its unseen owners for food and space. Like any good husbandman, the immortals had decided to thin the herd out.

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws.' The self-deprecation of mass man carried to its symbolic limit. How does he see himself? Not merely as a crustacean. Not even as a crustacean, only the very abstraction of a crustacean: claws. And ragged, at that. In the next line we see-

Of course you are discontented," God thundered. "I made you discontented, because if you weren't discontented, why would you bother to try to become better?" "Better than what?" I asked, trembling in spite of myself. "Better than Me," cried God.

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.

That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.

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.

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

A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas.

You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.