Jerry Pournelle

“So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.”

“We're basically after Joe's beer money, and Joe likes his beer, so you better make sure that what you give him is at least as pleasurable to him as having his six-pack of beer would be.”

“The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.”

“We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity. I am afraid. I will taste fear until I die.”

“And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.”

“There were probably, what, 300 science-fiction members in the SFWA, of whom probably a hundred were active members in the sense that they were selling something every year, or every couple years.”

“And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.”

“Heinlein never had a best-seller. Even, I think, with Stranger in a Strange Land, I don't think it was actually on the New York Times best seller list.”

“I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.”

“You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.”

“And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg... we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is.”

“We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.”

“I have more information in one place than anybody in the world.”

“You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it's all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.”

“One the other hand, the publishing trend is ghastly, isn't it? Two hundred and something distributors are now down to 10 or 12? And what's the recruiting drive?”

“Mr. Prince, would you like to know the most significant event in the history of freedom?""The American Revolution?""A defensible choice, a close second even, but not mine. I would choose the moment when the Roman plebians required the patricians to write down the twelve tables of the law and put them where everyone could see them -- thereby proclaimed the law supreme over the politicians. The rule of law is the essence of freedom.”

“Asimov was the reason why we changed some rules in the SFWA, and I'm not convinced we changed it for the best.”

“The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?”

“Because Tom Doherty and people like that are not stupid. If they could have streamlined their operation more to get more money out of it, they would have done it. It's not like they're a bunch of idiots.”

“In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.”