Theodore Sturgeon Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

More and more, I've come to the feeling that I'm looking for people who believe in something, virtually anything, providing they believe in it.

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.

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.

An old-shoe lover loves loving old shoes.

The best Science Fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.

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

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

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 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.

I've hung around in absolute exhaustion and starvation waiting for an idea to hit, which might have been months. I've talked things over with editors, found out what they wanted, and when they wanted it delivered.

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.

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.

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

Ninety percent of SF [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.

If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?

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

I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

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.

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.

A science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its scientific content.

Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone." "Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone." He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.

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

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

Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you?” “It's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted and illogical and then coming face to face with yourself, looking at yourself exactly as you look to everyone else?

Ask the next question.

You must write to the people's expertise.

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

Even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.

Even if this is the end of humankind, we dare not take away the chances some other life-form might have to succeed where we failed. If we retaliate, there will not be a dog, a deer, an ape, a bird or fish or lizard to carry the evolutionary torch. In the name of justice, if we must condemn and destroy ourselves, let us not condemn all life along with us! We are heavy enough with sins. If we must destroy, let us stop with destroying ourselves!

There's this about a farm: when the market's good there's money, and when it's bad there's food.

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

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

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

The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and ... and earns. It's a thing he can't have when he's very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it's truly part of him as long as he lives.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Nothing is always absolutely so

There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.

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

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

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

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Writing is a communication.