Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

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

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

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'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

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

- 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

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

- 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

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

- 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

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- 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

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

You must write to the people's expertise.

- Theodore Sturgeon

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

- 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

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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.

- 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

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

- 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

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

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

Writing is a communication.

- Theodore Sturgeon