Quotes By Theodore Sturgeon

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

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.

Writing is a communication.

You must write to the people's expertise.

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

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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

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

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

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

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

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