Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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

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

Writing is a communication.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?

Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.

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.

Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic.

They say dogs ignore their reflections in mirrors because they can't smell them. Dogs, unlike people, are not fooled by what they see.

Nothing is always absolutely so

It's the Simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

You must write to the people's expertise.

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

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

The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.

If ever you want to touch the hand and the heart of God Almighty, you can do it through the body of someone you love. Anytime. Anywhere. Without no middleman.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

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

Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.

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

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

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

Love's a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with.

The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies - all about the pretty ones who really own the world.

An old-shoe lover loves loving old shoes.

Morals: They're nothing but a coded survival instinct!

As far as Im concerned, I didnt dream - ever.

The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.

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

Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

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

An ethic isn't a fact you can look up. It's a way of thinking.

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.

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.

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

Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love." "He says only if you love yourself.

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

That's fairly common. We don't believe anything we don't want to believe.

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

No man can rob successfully over a period of years without pleasing the people he robs.

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

Ask the next question.