Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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

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

Writing is a communication.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 it is crud.

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

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

Nothing is always absolutely so

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

You must write to the people's expertise.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies - all about the pretty ones who really own the world.

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

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.

An old-shoe lover loves loving old shoes.

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

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

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

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

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

Ask the next question.

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

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!

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

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