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"Asimov was the reason why we changed some rules in the SFWA, and I'm not convinced we changed it for the best."
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Exlpore more Reason quotes
"Behind every effect there is a cause. You can never eliminate an effect without first understanding its cause."
"Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being-not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement-not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason."
"Religion is a distraction from true education."
"The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there, And warmly debated the matter; The Orthodox said that it came from the air, And the Heretics said from the platter. They argued it long and they argued it strong, And I hear they are arguing now; But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese, Not one of them thought of a cow."
Explore more quotes by Jerry Pournelle
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
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