Top 86 Theodore Sturgeon Quotes
#1. I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.
Theodore Sturgeon
#2. Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.
Theodore Sturgeon
#3. There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do.
Theodore Sturgeon
#4. Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic.
Theodore Sturgeon
#6. Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.
Theodore Sturgeon
#8. He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared to escape out of it.
Theodore Sturgeon
#9. 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
#10. An ethic isn't a fact you can look up. It's a way of thinking.
Theodore Sturgeon
#12. A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.
Theodore Sturgeon
#14. Sitting there most of the night," she said, "I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted 'trees ever made bonsai out of one another?
Theodore Sturgeon
#15. Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.
Theodore Sturgeon
#16. 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
#17. I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don't dream, because I never could retrieve a dream.
Theodore Sturgeon
#19. 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
#21. Anybody can do anything he wants to if he wants to do it badly enough.
Theodore Sturgeon
#23. 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.
Theodore Sturgeon
#24. I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.
Theodore Sturgeon
#26. So when it happens, don't just say Damn and forget it. Stop a minute and think it through. Somebody's going to change the face of the earth and it could be you.
'It Was Nothing
Really!', 1969
Theodore Sturgeon
#27. 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
#29. Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. It's the symbol of everything humanity has ever created, and is the reason it has been created.
Theodore Sturgeon
#30. When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.
Theodore Sturgeon
#31. 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
#32. Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
Theodore Sturgeon
#33. My wife is beginning to instruct me on means to retrieve dreams, and bit by bit, it does seem to be working.
Theodore Sturgeon
#34. Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?
Theodore Sturgeon
#35. Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.
Theodore Sturgeon
#36. 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
#37. I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week.
Theodore Sturgeon
#38. 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.
Theodore Sturgeon
#39. Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing.
Theodore Sturgeon
#40. I said this before and I will have to say it again, when you come right down to it there is not a thing a man needs than a way to fill his belly and let somebody take care of all his thinking, he don't have to if he don't want to.
Theodore Sturgeon
#41. We are now in a position to determine just what sort of science fiction story this really is.
Theodore Sturgeon
#42. Original sin," he said thoughtfully. "That's about Adam an' - no, wait. I remember. Everybody's supposed to be sinful to start with because it takes a sin to get'm started.
Theodore Sturgeon
#43. It was spring, the part of spring where the bursting is done, the held-in pressures of desiccated sap-veins and gum-sealed buds are gone, and all the world's in a rush to be beautiful.
Theodore Sturgeon
#44. It's the Simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that.
Theodore Sturgeon
#45. 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
#46. Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.
Theodore Sturgeon
#47. 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
#48. Living things aren't finished, you see. Everything they have ever been in contact with, each thought they have had, each person they have known - these things are still at work in them; nothing's finished.
("The Graveyard Reader")
Theodore Sturgeon
#49. Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love."
"He says only if you love yourself.
Theodore Sturgeon
#50. 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.
Theodore Sturgeon
#51. There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do.
Theodore Sturgeon
#53. Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he's ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.
Theodore Sturgeon
#56. He had an animal's maturity, in which the play of kittens and puppies no longer has a function. His spectrum lay between terror and contentment.
Theodore Sturgeon
#59. It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.
Theodore Sturgeon
#61. 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
#62. Eddy, I've made my own way since I was a kid, and when I marry it's going to be because the man I love and a girl named Tina are traveling together in the same direction at approximately the same speed, and each under his own power. I won't be steered, towed, nor provided with an icebreaker. ( ... )
Theodore Sturgeon
#64. I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.
Theodore Sturgeon
#65. The alternative is to locate large deposits of specifically what we need, and extract it in bulk from the earth."
"That's mining," said the Drip. "There is a twenty-third century legend that youth was conscripted to work in mines. Anyhow, all young people were known as miners at one period.
Theodore Sturgeon
#66. 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
Theodore Sturgeon
#67. 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
#68. Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.
Theodore Sturgeon
#69. 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
#70. 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.
Theodore Sturgeon
#72. For years, I thought I simply didn't dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn't have.
Theodore Sturgeon
#73. Evelyn said, "What's it called when a person needs a ... person ... when you want to be touched and the ... two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?"
Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. "Love," she said at length. She swallowed. "It's a madness. It's bad.
Theodore Sturgeon
#74. There's this about a farm: when the market's good there's money, and when it's bad there's food.
Theodore Sturgeon
#75. That's fairly common. We don't believe anything we don't want to believe.
Theodore Sturgeon
#76. 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
#77. The only thumbnail you'll get from me is this: no one knows what's really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.
Theodore Sturgeon
#78. 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
#79. If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?
Theodore Sturgeon
#80. You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one.
Theodore Sturgeon
#82. Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.
Theodore Sturgeon
#83. No man can rob successfully over a period of years without pleasing the people he robs.
Theodore Sturgeon
#84. 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
#85. They say dogs ignore their reflections in mirrors because they can't smell them. Dogs, unlike people, are not fooled by what they see.
Theodore Sturgeon
#86. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
