Theodore Sturgeon

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do.”

“Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you?” “It's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted and illogical and then coming face to face with yourself, looking at yourself exactly as you look to everyone else?”

“Had I been screaming, screaming, in some way? I with my life so separate and well-ordered in the company of my green things and my sky and the animals of the hillside? I shouted - it was a demand - I shouted and shook him: "Godbody!" And as usual he understood me perfectly: 'You was lonesome,' he said.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Does anyone ask a painter -- even the painter himself -- why he paints? Now me, I painted... used to... whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint.But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I've always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I'm crossing it late.("To Here and the Easel", 1954)”

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

“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”

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

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

“You must write to the people's expertise.”

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