Top 22 Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

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

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

There is no way of writing stories that I haven‘t done.

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

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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

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

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

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.

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.

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