Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

My wife is beginning to instruct me on means to retrieve dreams, and bit by bit, it does seem to be working... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Ninety percent of everything is crap... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

When I can't do something, this always impels me to study it... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Writing is a communication... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

You must write to the people's expertise... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Anybody can do anything he wants to if he wants to do it badly enough... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

For years, I thought I simply didn't dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn't have... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I feel angry that I can't be hypnotized. I'm not putting it down, and I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I have talked to a great many people who are very good at it, but so far nobody has ever been able to hypnotize me... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don't dream, because I never could retrieve a dream... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I quit my job, and went ashore to become a writer... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

You have to study your field and you have to find out how other people do it, and you have to keep working and learning and practicing and ultimately, you would be able to do it... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon

I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it... view

By: Theodore Sturgeon