Frederik Pohl Quotations

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

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

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

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

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

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

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.

In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.

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

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.

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

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

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a method which distinguishes SF from fantasy, though a lot of the science fiction written does not go by that method, and some fantasy does.

Cosmology, nuclear physics, I do try to keep up on. They get more complex, and then some of the old theories just don't work out.

The way you write science fiction is: you sit down at your writing machine and you open your mind to the first thought that comes through.

A lot of science fiction is science-based, and it comes about because people notice something interesting about science and work it into a story.

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.

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

When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating.

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.

Science fiction is the very literature of change.

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.

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

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

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you.

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

For someone to be taken seriously it was valuable to have the appearance of someone who deserved to be taken seriously.

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 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.

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

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