For years, I thought I simply didn’t dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn’t have. – Theodore Sturgeon
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
I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that’s what you do. – Theodore Sturgeon
When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you’ve got a good writer. – Theodore Sturgeon
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
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
It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself. – Theodore Sturgeon
Here’s the point to be made – there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing. – Theodore Sturgeon
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
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
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. – Theodore Sturgeon
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
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
You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody’s an expert on that one. – Theodore Sturgeon
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
