Quotes By Theodore Sturgeon
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
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.
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.
Theodore Sturgeon
There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do.
Theodore Sturgeon
For years, I thought I simply didn't dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn't have.
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.
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.
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.
Theodore Sturgeon
When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.
Theodore Sturgeon
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.
Theodore Sturgeon
I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don't dream, because I never could retrieve a dream.
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.
Theodore Sturgeon
It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.
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.
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.
Theodore Sturgeon
There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do.
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.
Theodore Sturgeon