Theodore Sturgeon famous quotes

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

#Loneliness #Being Alone #Writing

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Fiction #Limits #Fields

Writing is a communication.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Communication #Writing

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

#Lightning #Strikes

Ninety percent of everything is crap.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Drinking #Ninety #Crap

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

#Writing #Letters #Stories

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

#Two #Mind #Different

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Loneliness #Soul #Quality

Nothing is always absolutely so
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Fun

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Writing #Fiction #Stories

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Love #Heart #Hands

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Life #Stronger #Flow

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Thinking #People #Shut Up

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

#Baby #Love Yourself #Someone You Love

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

#Writing #People

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

#Dream #Conviction

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

#Dream #Years #Left 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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Using Words #Reason

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

#People #Important #Want

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

#Want #Enough

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Nuts #Movers And Shakers #Shakers

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

#Writing #Important #Fiction

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

#Dream #Concerned

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

#Writing #Fire #Caves

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

#Writing #Done #Way

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

#Believe #Want #Common

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

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

#Lonely #Loneliness #Long

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

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Editors #Ideas #Waiting

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

#People #Would Be #Able

The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Majority #Fiction #Commerce

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

#Fields #Fiction #Science Fiction

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 #Stories

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

#Science #Reality #Tests

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

#Simple #Trying #Remember

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

#Mean #Survival #Alive

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

#Brother #Men

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

#Men #Years #People

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

#Fiction #Science Fiction #Ninety

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?
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Mirrors #Looks #Earth

Ask the next question.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Next

You must write to the people's expertise.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Writing #People #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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Writing #Dollars #Stories

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

#Writing #Science #Fiction

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

#Writing #Ideas #People

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

#Jobs #Quitting #I Quit

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

#Men #Hypnosis #President

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

#Philosophical #Humor #Writing

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

#Dream #Mean #Wife

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

#Courage #Teenager #Writing

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

#Writing #Firsts #Students

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

#Space #Interesting #Empty

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

#Skills #Comeback

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

#Study

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

#Cheating #Stories #Paper

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Years #People #Example

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.
-- Theodore Sturgeon

#Long #Conviction #Young

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

#Thinking #Way #Facts

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

#People #Moral #Helping

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

#Survival #Moral #Instinct

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

#Mean #Two #Made

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

#Dollars #Sometimes #Week

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

#Dream #Astonishment