Quotes from Theodore Sturgeon

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

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

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.

Writing is a communication.

If ever you want to touch the hand and the heart of God Almighty, you can do it through the body of someone you love. Anytime. Anywhere. Without no middleman.

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.

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

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.

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.

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.

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

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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.

If you can't be really good at anything, then the only way to be able to prove you are superior is to make someone else inferior. It is this rampaging need in humanity which has, since pre-history, driven a man to stand on the neck of his neighbor, a nation to enslave another, a race to tread on a race. But it is also what men have always done to women.

God, he cries, dying on Mars, God, we made it!

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)

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

Things grow for me in the garden, little green promises that, in good time, are kept: I will give you tomatoes, I promise you corn. People do not always keep their promises, even when you tend their soil.

I have seen a lot of ugly things as a trainee and as a nurse, but they don't bother me very much. It's not that the familiarity hardens one; it is rather that one learns the knack of channelling one's emotions around the ugly thing.

Por qué tenemos que amar donde cae el relámpago y no donde nosotros elegimos?... Pero me alegro que seas tú, pequeño principe. Me alegro que seas tú.

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.

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

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.