Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

Nothing is always absolutely so

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.

Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

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

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

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!

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

An old-shoe lover loves loving old shoes.

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

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 is no way of writing stories that I haven't done.

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

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

Ask the next question.

Writing is a communication.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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

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

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.

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.

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

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

The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.

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

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

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

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

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

You must write to the people's expertise.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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