73 Quotes by Frederik Pohl

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.

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

For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody.

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.

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.

The bump of ego on his skull had swollen large, so he saw the whole world in terms of what it could give him.

If a picture on the wall can remember, you remember that this is not the first time. If a picture on the wall can know things, you know that he has tried to leap out of that window before, and he is about to try again. He is trying to kill himself. He has tried nine times in the past fifty days. If a picture on the wall can regret, you regret this. It is a terrible waste for this man to keep trying to kill himself, since he does not at all want to die.

How long the party lasted Forrester did not know. He remembered a long harangue in which the drunken ballet dancer was trying to explain to him that the accent was Martian, not German; something to do with six-hundred-millibar oxyhelium air, which got them out of the habit of hearing certain frequencies.

I let myself flop - so gently, so slowly - into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.