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"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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"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"People do not understand what a great revenue economy is."
"Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
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Explore more quotes by Jerry Pournelle
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection."
"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."
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