Top 70 Theodore Sturgeon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “90% of everything is crap.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

2. “Nothing is always absolutely so.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

4. “Ask the next question.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

7. “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”

— Theodore Sturgeon

8. “It’s the Simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

9. “Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?”

— Theodore Sturgeon

10. “An old-shoe lover loves loving old shoes.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

12. “There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

13. “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

14. “The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

16. “Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

17. “Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

18. “Even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

19. “Here’s the point to be made – there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

20. “A science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

21. “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

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

23. “An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

24. “I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

25. “You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody’s an expert on that one.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

26. “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.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

27. “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.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

28. “God,” he cries, dying on Mars, “God, we made it!”

— Theodore Sturgeon

29. “Morals: They’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!”

— Theodore Sturgeon

30. “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

31. “When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you’ve got a good writer.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

32. “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.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

33. “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.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

34. “Writing is a communication.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

35. “You must write to the people’s expertise.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

37. “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

38. “They say dogs ignore their reflections in mirrors because they can’t smell them. Dogs, unlike people, are not fooled by what they see.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon

41. “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

42. “Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he’s ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

43. “The only thumbnail you’ll get from me is this: no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

44. “Sitting there most of the night,” she said, “I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted ’trees ever made bonsai out of one another?”

— Theodore Sturgeon

45. “As far as Im concerned, I didnt dream – ever.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

46. “Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

47. “The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies – all about the pretty ones who really own the world.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

48. “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.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

49. “There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn’t do.”

— Theodore Sturgeon

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

— Theodore Sturgeon