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

You must write to the people's expertise.

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- 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

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- 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

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- 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

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

- Theodore Sturgeon

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

- 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

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

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

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

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.

- Theodore Sturgeon