THEODORE STURGEON

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

You must write to the people's expertise.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.

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

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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.

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

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

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