Frederik Pohl quotes

Frederik Pohl was an American science fiction writer, editor, and fan, celebrated for his influential contributions to the genre. His work often explored social, political, and technological themes in imaginative ways. He helped shape modern science fiction through both his writing and his editorial leadership. Here are 57 of his quotes:

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

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

‘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.

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

It was an appeal to reason, and they're always dangerous. You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.

Frederik Pohl

Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn't just consequence? I think, and I've thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, porducing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever.

Frederik Pohl

Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears.

Frederik Pohl

I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements. Of course there wasn't anybody to send them to, but that didn't stop the Major. He said with determination: "Nobody's ever going to chew me out for noncompliance with regulations-even if I have to invent the regulations myself!”.

Frederik Pohl

There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars.

Frederik Pohl

He drew himself up and said with dignity: "We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: ‘Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.'”.

Frederik Pohl

All of them had been so tested and retested that they had acquired considerable skill in answering test questions the way the examiners wanted them answered.

Frederik Pohl