Quotes By Theodore Sturgeon

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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