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"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."
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"At the end of all spiritual paths, there lies only a cold graveyard; the path of science is the only path that may give you something better than this!"
"There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late."
"No definite sciencewithout trial & error."
"Science is knowledge meeting humility meeting curiosity: ever-evolving, always learning. Atheism is often but knowledge meeting arrogance: a masquerade under the wing of the beauty of science. Religion is infamously a weight under the one wing; then under the other is atheism, the championed masquerade."
"The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef."
"Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination."
Explore more quotes by Jerry Pournelle
"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."
"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."
"I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away."
"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?"
"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."
"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 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."
"Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed."
"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."
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