Search quotes by author:    A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 


Theodore Sturgeon Quotes


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

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.

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.

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.

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

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

Writing is a communication.

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 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.

You must write to the people's expertise.

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