Top 35 Frederik Pohl Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.”

— Frederik Pohl

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

— Frederik Pohl

3. “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

4. “Science fiction is the very literature of change.”

— Frederik Pohl

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

— Frederik Pohl

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Frederik Pohl

9. “I’m pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.”

— Frederik Pohl

10. “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

11. “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

12. “The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.”

— Frederik Pohl

13. “The FDA just ordered them off the market. The glaze is supposed to be poison – provided you drink at least forty cups of tea out of one of them every day of your life for twenty years.”

— Frederik Pohl

14. “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

15. “My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven’t cheated.”

— Frederik Pohl

16. “That was an all-purpose IBM 3070. It took up half a room and still did not have enough capacity to do all the jobs demanded of it.”

— Frederik Pohl

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “It’s clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.”

— Frederik Pohl

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

— Frederik Pohl

22. “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

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

— Frederik Pohl

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “I’m so busy listening to the heart that I don’t even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.”

— Frederik Pohl

31. “I’m doing a book, ‘Chasing Science,’ about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.”

— Frederik Pohl

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

— Frederik Pohl

33. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws.’ The self-deprecation of mass man carried to its symbolic limit. How does he see himself? Not merely as a crustacean. Not even as a crustacean, only the very abstraction of a crustacean: claws. And ragged, at that. In the next line we see-.”

— Frederik Pohl

34. “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

35. “The difference between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense.”

— Frederik Pohl

36. “But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words.”

— Frederik Pohl