Quotes by Frederik Pohl

About Frederik Pohl:

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning more than seventy-five years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led and articles and essays published in 2012.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Frederik Pohl

You almost threw it back!' she repeated, and her voice filled with mock horror. 'You foolish boy! Are you always so careless with items of value?' 'No,' he said, abruptly sober. 'I know what matters. And I never throw those things away. I hold on to ...

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

I was worried about sex," he went on. "But you know what, Sulie? It's like being told I can't have any caviar for the next couple years. I don't even like caviar. And when you come right down to it, I don't want sex right now. I supposed you punched ...

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

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).

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

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

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.

Frederik Pohl

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

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

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

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

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.

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

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

Frederik Pohl

Author Bio

  • NameFrederik Pohl
  • DescriptionAmerican science fiction writer and editor
  • AliasesFrederik George Pohl, Jr.; Frederik Pohl II; more than 10 pseudonyms
  • BornNovember 26, 1919
  • DiedSeptember 2, 2013
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionEditor; Novelist; Writer
  • AwardsNebula Award; National Book Award