Theodore Sturgeon
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
Theodore Sturgeon

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
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
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon

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.

Theodore Sturgeon
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
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
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
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
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon
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
Theodore Sturgeon

Writing is a communication.

Theodore Sturgeon
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.