Frederik Pohl > Quotes

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
― Frederik Pohl

“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, Gateway

“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, Gateway

“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 that into the computer? 'Cut down sex drive, increase euphoria'? Anyway, it finally penetrated my little brain that I was just making trouble for myself, worrying about whether I could get along without something I really didn't want. It's a reflection of what I think other people think I should want.”
― Frederik Pohl, Man Plus

“I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

“What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?”
― Frederik Pohl, Gateway

“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.”
― Frederik Pohl

“You asked me, 'Do you call this living?" And I answer: Yes, it is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.”
― Frederik Pohl, Gateway

“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.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Best of Frederik Pohl

“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara”
― Frederik pohl, Gateway

“You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants

“And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing.”
― Frederik Pohl, Jem

“I'm so busy listening to the heart that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.”
― Frederik Pohl, Gateway

“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, The Midas Plague

“It was a dimly glowing mass of pale-blue light, mottled, immense, and terrifying. Even at the first glimpse I knew it was not a sun. No sun can be so blue and so dim. It hurt the eyes to look at it, not because of its brightness. It hurt inside the eyes, up far into the optic track; the pain was in the brain itself.”
― Frederick Pohl, Gateway

“She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now! I can't live with that.”
― Frederik Pohl, Gateway

“There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.”
― Frederik Pohl, Gateway

“The bump of ego on his skull had swollen large, so he saw the whole world in terms of what it could give him.”
― Frederik Pohl, Man Plus

“Four thousand A.U. plus is a long trip-and that’s as the crow flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires, because of course there aren’t a lot of crows in near-interstellar space.”
― Frederik Pohl, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

“Slaves dream of freedom, commoners dream of becoming kings, what do kings dream of?”
― Frederick Pohl

“Total available Calories divided by Population equals Artistic-Technological Style. When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large—say, five thousand or more, five thousand daily calories for every living person—then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture enormous automobiles to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one lipstick. Life is coarse and rich where C:P is large. At the other extreme, where C:P is too small, life does not exist at all. It has starved out. Experimentally, add little increments to C:P and it will be some time before the right-hand side of the equation becomes significant. But at last, in the 1,000 to 1,500 calorie range, Artistic-Technological Style firmly appears in self-perpetuating form. C:P in that range produces the small arts, the appreciations, the peaceful arrangements of necessities into subtle relationships of traditionally agreed-upon virtue. Think of Japan, locked into its Shogunate prison, with a hungry population scrabbling food out of mountainsides and beauty out of arrangements of lichens. The small, inexpensive sub-sub-arts are characteristic of the 1,000 to 1,500 calorie range.”
― Frederik Pohl, Wolfbane

“And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”
― Frederik Pohl

“The difference between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense.”
― Frederik Pohl, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

“Cornut knew that that was what the immortals wanted. They had kept their herd of contended, helpless, shortlived cattle long enough. The herd had prospered until it competed with its unseen owners for food and space. Like any good husbandman, the immortals had decided to thin the herd out.”
― Frederik Pohl, Drunkard's Walk

“Wealth ... or death. Those were the choices Gateway offered. Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; others returned with their remains
barely identifiable. It was the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there was no shortage of desperate.”
― Frederik Pohl

“La relación es evidente. Sube la publicidad, baja la poesía. Las personas capaces de escribir poemas musicales, emocionantes, conmovedores, son muy pocas. Cuando fue posible obtener excelentes entradas aplicando el talento lírico a la publicidad, la poesía quedó en manos de unos chiflados sin inspiración que gritan para hacerse oír y tratan de distinguirse con actitudes excéntricas.”
― Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth

“It is not a cheap commodity, love. Some of us can have it and never face the bill, but only if someone else picks up the check.”
― Frederik Pohl, Heechee Rendezvous

“Voi tutti sapete cos'hanno fatto. Hanno dichiarato illegale l'uso di impulsi subsonici nella pubblicità audio. Ma noi abbiamo ribattuto con un elenco di parole chiave, semanticamente collegate con ogni trauma o nevrosi presenti nella moderna vita americana. Hanno dato retta ai fissati della sicurezza stradale e ci impediscono di proiettare i nostri messaggi sul parabrezza delle macchine, ma noi ci difendiamo. Il laboratorio mi informa — e indicò il direttore del nostro Reparto Scientifico — che presto sperimenteremo un sistema capace di proiettare la pubblicità direttamente sulla retina.”
― Frederik Pohl

“But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words.”
― Frederik Pohl, Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

“Mi sentido de la iniciativa, la cualidad que me había llevado a ser lo que era, estaba agonizando poco a poco. Las dosis mínimas de alcaloides me paralizaban la voluntad, pero peor aún era esa sensación de impotencia y desesperanza. Pensaba ya que así era el mundo, que nunca cambiaría, que al fin y al cabo esto no era tan terrible, que uno siempre podía entrar en trance ante una hermosa pantalla o emborracharse con Gaseosa, o probar una de esas cápsulas verdes que pasaban de mano en mano con diversas consignas. Los muchachos esperarían con agrado el día de cobro.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants