Daily Inspiration Quote by Jerry Pournelle

There is a sly defensiveness in Pournelle's plainspoken insistence that "we tell stories" - as if narrative itself is a rebuttal to whatever argument is happening offstage. The line sets up a quiet culture war: not between genres, but between storytellers and the people who police storytelling. Dropping names like Anderson and Silverberg isn't just camaraderie; it's credentialing. He is staking out a canon of working pros who understand the oldest trick in the book: keep the reader turning pages.

The repetition of "they want to know" does double duty. On the surface, it's a humble description of reader appetite. Underneath, it's a jab at literary fashion that treats plot as gauche and closure as suspect. Pournelle frames suspense and ending as democratic virtues: ordinary people like stories that pay off. The subtext is that taste is measurable and legitimacy isn't. If readers "like them", then the critic's sneer becomes irrelevant.

Context matters. Pournelle came up in an era when science fiction was still arguing for its seat at the adult table, even as it quietly dominated mass imagination. His journalism-trained bluntness rejects aesthetic mystique. "How it comes out" is almost journalistic, the language of elections and wars and court cases - outcomes, consequences, resolution. He's defending narrative as a contract: you promise meaning, you deliver an ending. The point isn't that endings are neat. It's that finishing the story is a kind of respect for the audience, and for reality itself, where things don't just signify - they happen.