Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Eugene Pournelleis an American science fiction writer, essayist and journalist who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte. Pournelle served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1973...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 August 1933
CountryUnited States of America
high-prices
Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.
believe cooking different
Much of economics isn't difficult, or rather, the difficulty is in cooking up arguments to "prove" that commonsense conclusions are wrong. The fact is that many commonsense conclusions are quite correct, and it takes a lot of education to get you to believe different.
life-and-love information importance
The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.
political desire politics
Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.
literature stuff reason
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
stupid people done
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.
men done aspire
What man has done, man can aspire to do.
law people goal
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]
errors doe made
That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.
mean writing stories
I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story.
age mcr program
I have a big collection of quotation programs...In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.
research littles lists
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.
editors lunch giving
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.
running philosophy war
Gates has always understood Moore's Law better than anyone else in the industry. If you can make something run at all, get it out there -it may be slow and clunky, but hardware improvements will bail you out. If you wait until it's running perfectly on the hardware already in the field, it will be obsolete before it's released. This philosophy built Microsoft and is the main reason Microsoft won the war IBM declared back in the OS/2 days.