Theodore Sturgeon Quotes & Sayings

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life. — Theodore Sturgeon

Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose? — Theodore Sturgeon

Writing is a communication. — Theodore Sturgeon

They say dogs ignore their reflections in mirrors because they can't smell them. Dogs, unlike people, are not fooled by what they see. — Theodore Sturgeon

( ... ) my preoccupation in a larger sense is the optimum man. The question of establishing an internal ecology, where the optimum liver works with the optimum spleen and the optimum eyeball and so forth. Now, when you get to the mind - not the brain, but the optimum mind - then you have the whole inner space idea; my conviction is that there's more room there than there is in outer space, in each individual human being. Love of course has a great deal to do with that, as a necessary coloration and adjunct to everything that we do - to love oneself, to love the parts of oneself, to love the interaction of the parts of oneself, and then the interaction of that whole organism with those of another person. Which is as good a definition of love as you can get, I think. — Theodore Sturgeon

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. — Theodore Sturgeon

We are now in a position to determine just what sort of science fiction story this really is. — Theodore Sturgeon

Every agent has a Sig Weiss - as a rosy dream. You sit there day after day paddling through oceans of slush, hoping one day to run across a manuscript that means something - sincerity, integrity, high word rates - things like that. You try to understand what editors want in spite of what they say they want, and then you try to tell it to writers who never listen unless they're talking. You lend them money and psychoanalyze them and agree with them when they lie to themselves. When they write stories that don't make it, it's your fault. When they write stories that do make it, they did it by themselves. And when they hit the big time, they get themselves another agent. In the meantime, nobody likes you. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you. — Theodore Sturgeon

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 — Theodore Sturgeon

No man can rob successfully over a period of years without pleasing the people he robs. — Theodore Sturgeon

If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? — Theodore Sturgeon

Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. It's the symbol of everything humanity has ever created, and is the reason it has been created. — 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

There's this about a farm: when the market's good there's money, and when it's bad there's food. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

The baby regarded Mike gravely as she discoursed to it about a poor drowned woofum-wuffums, and did the bad man treat it badly, then. The baby belched eloquently.
"He belches in English!" I remarked.
"Did it have the windy ripples?" cooed Mike. "Give us a kiss, honey lamb."
The baby immediately flung its little arms around her neck and planted a whopper on her mouth.
"Wow!" said Mike when she got her breath. "Shorty, could you take lessons!"
"Lessons my eye," I said jealously. "Mike, that's no baby, that's some old guy in his second childhood. — Theodore Sturgeon

An old-shoe lover loves loving old shoes. — Theodore Sturgeon

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas. — Theodore Sturgeon

An ethic isn't a fact you can look up. It's a way of thinking. — Theodore Sturgeon

The only thumbnail you'll get from me is this: no one knows what's really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it. — Theodore Sturgeon

Even if this is the end of humankind, we dare not take away the chances some other life-form might have to succeed where we failed. If we retaliate, there will not be a dog, a deer, an ape, a bird or fish or lizard to carry the evolutionary torch. In the name of justice, if we must condemn and destroy ourselves, let us not condemn all life along with us! We are heavy enough with sins. If we must destroy, let us stop with destroying ourselves! — Theodore Sturgeon

I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. — Theodore Sturgeon

There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do. — Theodore Sturgeon

Morals: They're nothing but a coded survival instinct! — Theodore Sturgeon

[Mom] said she worked hard and saw to it he ate and got good clothes and had a place for himself. She said it funny and she said it so often you didn't hear it any more, but she did say it.
Pop also said he worked hard all day and when he came home he had a right. He said it to Mom and he said it to Jorry. Then Jorry would say whatever it was he always said, and nobody heard him either.
Jorry began to walk faster.
Because if there was a way to say something to Mom, and if she could say it to him and to Pop, so that they heard each other, they wouldn't need to stay mad or feel useless, not any of them. Like if somehow you can make people just listen to each other, not just listen to you. And you listen too. Everybody. — 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

When I got back to my office Tween was there. She rose from the foyer couch as I wheezed in off the ramp. I took one look at her and said, "Come inside." She followed me through the inner door. I waved my hand over the infra-red plate and it closed. Then I put out my arms.
She bleated like a new-born lamb and flew to me. Her tears were scalding, and I don't think human muscles are built for the wrenching those agonized sobs gave her. People should cry more. They ought to learn how to do it easily, like laughing or sweating. Crying piles up. In people like Tween, who do nothing if they can't smile and make a habit-pattern of it, it really piles up. With a reservoir like that, and no developed outlet, things get torn when the pressure builds too high.
I just held her tight so she wouldn't explode. The only thing I said to her was "sh-h-h" once when she tried to talk while she wept. One thing at a time. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

You must write to the people's expertise. — Theodore Sturgeon

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. — Theodore Sturgeon

Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

Love's a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with. — Theodore Sturgeon

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it. — Theodore Sturgeon

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. — Theodore Sturgeon

He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared to escape out of it. — Theodore Sturgeon

Nothing is always absolutely so — Theodore Sturgeon

Ask the next question. — Theodore Sturgeon

He picked up three long fresh stalks of timothy and braided them together. He upended the scythe and thrust the handle deep enough into the soft earth so it would stand upright. He tied the braided grass to one of the grips and slipped the whetstone into the loops so it would stay. Then he walked off into the woods. — Theodore Sturgeon

He had an animal's maturity, in which the play of kittens and puppies no longer has a function. His spectrum lay between terror and contentment. — Theodore Sturgeon

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them. — Theodore Sturgeon

As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever. — Theodore Sturgeon

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. — Theodore Sturgeon

I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it. — Theodore Sturgeon

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. — Theodore Sturgeon

There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done. — Theodore Sturgeon

So when it happens, don't just say Damn and forget it. Stop a minute and think it through. Somebody's going to change the face of the earth and it could be you.
'It Was Nothing
Really!', 1969 — Theodore Sturgeon

Miss Kuhli (Merrihew had heard it "Cooley" the day before, and had built quite a different picture) was Eurasian. Not since the perfection of ferro-concrete and its self-stressed freedom has architecture been able to match the construction of such eyelids and supraorbital arches as those with which Miss Kuhli had been born. Her hands seemed to be the cooperative work of a florist and a choreographer. Her body had not been designed, but inspired, and her hair was such that it could not be believed at a single glance. — Theodore Sturgeon

For years, I thought I simply didn't dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn't have. — Theodore Sturgeon

During their subsequent meetings, which were soon and often, Lance confessed and anatomized his passion for her. He even gave her its (the passion's, of course) biography. It had been born of a book jacket, the one responsible for the only really nice thing ever said about Eloise Michaud in a metropolitan review - The photo-portrait on the book jacket will move as many books as, say, good writing might. To be honest, however, the picture is worth quite the price of the volume. Miss Michaud is the most scrumptious scrivener ever to set pen to the paper of a book-club contract. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he's ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging. — Theodore Sturgeon

Living things aren't finished, you see. Everything they have ever been in contact with, each thought they have had, each person they have known - these things are still at work in them; nothing's finished.
("The Graveyard Reader") — Theodore Sturgeon

The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and ... and earns. It's a thing he can't have when he's very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it's truly part of him as long as he lives. — Theodore Sturgeon

Sometimes I sets and thinks, and sometimes I just sets. — Theodore Sturgeon

Evelyn said, "What's it called when a person needs a ... person ... when you want to be touched and the ... two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?"
Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. "Love," she said at length. She swallowed. "It's a madness. It's bad. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

90 percent of everything is crap. — 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 learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week. — Theodore Sturgeon

Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love."
"He says only if you love yourself. — Theodore Sturgeon

Original sin," he said thoughtfully. "That's about Adam an' - no, wait. I remember. Everybody's supposed to be sinful to start with because it takes a sin to get'm started. — 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

I said this before and I will have to say it again, when you come right down to it there is not a thing a man needs than a way to fill his belly and let somebody take care of all his thinking, he don't have to if he don't want to. — Theodore Sturgeon

He let a vision of April grow and fill the world. ( ... ) He saw April at the spaceport, holding him in the dark shadows of the blockhouse while the sky flamed above them. We'll go out like that soon, soon, Tod. Squeeze me, squeeze me ... Ah, he'd said, who needs a ship?
Another April, part of her in a dim light as she sat writing; her hair, a crescent of light loving her cheek, a band of it on her brow; then she had seen him and turned, rising, smothered his first word with her mouth. Another April wanting to smile, waiting; and April asleep, and once April sobbing because she could not find a special word to tell him what she felt for him ... — 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

Reality isn't the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we're engineered for it. It's a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can't tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function. — Theodore Sturgeon

Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

He thought, in your most secret dreams you cut a niche for yourself, and it is finished early, and then you wait for someone to come along to fill it - but to fill it exactly, every cut, curve, hollow and plane of it. And people do come along, and one covers up the niche, and another rattles around inside it, and another is so surrounded by fog that for the longest time you don't know if she fits or not; but each of them hits you with a tremendous impact. And then one comes along and slips in so quietly that you don't know when it happened, and fits so well you almost can't feel anything at all. And that is it.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked him.
He told her, immediately and fully. She nodded as if he had been talking about cats or cathedrals or cam-shafts, or anything else beautiful and complex. She said, "That's right. It isn't all there, of course. It isn't even enough. But everything else isn't enough without it."
"What is 'everything else'? — Theodore Sturgeon

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

Sturgeons Revelation: 90% of everything is crap — Theodore Sturgeon

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts. — Theodore Sturgeon

Sitting there most of the night," she said, "I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted 'trees ever made bonsai out of one another? — Theodore Sturgeon

Ninety percent of everything is crap. — Theodore Sturgeon

Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people. — Theodore Sturgeon

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities. — Theodore Sturgeon

It's the Simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that. — Theodore Sturgeon

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. — Theodore Sturgeon

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? — Theodore Sturgeon

Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough. — Theodore Sturgeon

Be a man. Not any old man, not mankind, but manhood. To do this you don't need to play pro football and grow hair on your chest and seduce every third woman you meet long as she's female. All you have to do is hunt, fish (or talk sense about 'em as if you had) and go bug-eyed when the girls go by. If a sunset moves you so much you have to express yourself, do it with a grunt and a dirty word. Or you say, 'That Beethoven, he blows a cool symphony.' Never champion a real underdog unless it's a popular type, like a baseball team. Always treat other men as if you were sore at something and will wipe it off on them if they give you the slightest excuse. I mean sore, Louis, not vexed or in a snit. And stay away from women. They have an intuition that'll find you nine times out of ten. The tenth time she falls for you, and there's nothing funnier."
"I think," Loolyo said after a time, "that you hate human beings. — Theodore Sturgeon

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. — Theodore Sturgeon

We walked out of there, and for the first time I felt the mood of a night without feeling that an author was ramming it down my throat for story purposes. I looked at the clean-swept, star-reaching cubism of the Radio City area and its living snakes of neon, and I suddenly thought of an Evelyn Smith story the general idea of which was "After they found out the atom bomb was magic, the rest of the magicians who enchanted refrigerators and washing machines and the telephone system came out into the open." I felt a breath of wind and wondered what it was that had breathed. I heard the snoring of the city and for an awesome second felt it would roll over, open its eyes, and ... speak. — Theodore Sturgeon

There was such a rush about me: wing, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light.
I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me, shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

Was a bird for about an hour," he said. "Tell you something about birds. People go around all the time sayin', 'Am I a man? Am I a woman, a real woman?' Lookin' at what they've done, wonderin' if that's what a man would do. Now, birds: they just birds. The one thing they never do is say, 'Am I a bird? — Theodore Sturgeon

90% of everything is crap. — 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

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

His body was tubby but his arms apparently couldn't understand that, for they were long and scrawny. From his brow to an inch below his eyes, his nose turned up; from there on, down. His short upper lip slanted sharply toward his tonsils, which had the effect of making his chinlessness positively jut.
( ... )
The bartender was fascinated by the way the teardrops proceeded down Biddiver's amazing nose. One drop would dash almost halfway, and then hesitate, daunted by the hump. Then it would be joined by another teardrop, and the two, merging, would surmount the obstacle and slip down to hang glittering over the disappearing lip until a sob came along to shake them off. — 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

That's fairly common. We don't believe anything we don't want to believe. — Theodore Sturgeon

God," he cries, dying on Mars, "God, we made it! — Theodore Sturgeon

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

Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic. — Theodore Sturgeon

The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies - all about the pretty ones who really own the world. — Theodore Sturgeon

You have to be away a long time, a long way, to miss someone like that, and me, I'd been farther away than anyone ought to be for too long plus six weeks. I kissed her and squeezed her until she yelled for mercy, and when I got to where I realized she was yelling we were clear back to the terrace, the whole length of the apartment away from the door. I guess I was sort of enthusiastic, but as I said ... oh, who can say a thing like that and make any sense? — Theodore Sturgeon