Jerry Pournelle Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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?”

“I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”