Quotes from Jerry Pournelle

We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.

The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?

Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.

One the other hand, the publishing trend is ghastly, isn't it? Two hundred and something distributors are now down to 10 or 12? And what's the recruiting drive?

You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it's all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.

I have a big collection of quotation programs...In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.

And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg... we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is.

A Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all.

Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.

Bureaucracies are progressive. meaning they have a burning fear that someone. somewhere, is doing something without permission.

Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.