Top 20 Quotes by Frederik Pohl

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

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

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.