Best 84 quotes of Theodore Sturgeon on MyQuotes

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.

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

An old-shoe lover loves loving old shoes.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.