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"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."
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"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."

"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 bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."

"Whatever good things people say of us, they tell us nothing new."

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."

"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
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."

"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."

"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."

"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 Aztecs believe they started up in what's now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That's a weird legend."
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