Quotes from Theodore Sturgeon

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

Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing.

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

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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

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

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

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

Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.

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.

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

You must write to the people's expertise.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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