Quotes By 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.

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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.

Writing is a communication.

You must write to the people's expertise.

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

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.