Frederik Pohl Quotes
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Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears.
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Specialization is the goal of civilization.
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There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars.
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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.
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She laughed out loud. It was a very nice laugh. No girl looks beautiful when she’s laughing hard, and girls who worry about looking beautiful don’t do it. Dorotha Keefer looked like a healthy, pretty girl having a good time, which when you come down to it is about the best way for a girl to look.
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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.
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I found a man who claimed he used to be a radio engineer. And if he was an engineer, I was Albert Einstein’s mother, but at least he knew which end of a soldering iron was hot.
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Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes.
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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).
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‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time-’That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down.
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People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
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That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.
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She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?
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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.
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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.
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The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
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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.
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I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.
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It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
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I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.