Theodore Sturgeon

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

“We are now in a position to determine just what sort of science fiction story this really is.”

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

“Why do you talk all the time?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but she cocked her head on one side and considered it carefully.“I think it’s ’cause I don’t know any big words, like you and Mummy,” she said, just in time to pull me out of my magazine again, “so I have to use lots and lots of little ones.”

“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.”

“Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.”

“Writing is a communication.”

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

“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.”

“As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever.”

“I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know 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 first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.”

“Ninety percent of everything is crap.”

“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.”

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

“Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.”

“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.”

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

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