Top 75 Quotes & Sayings 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Writing is a communication.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing is always absolutely so

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

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

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.

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

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

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?