Theodore Sturgeon Quotes - Page 2

An ethic isn't a fact you can look up. It's a way of thinking.

Ask the next question.

Even if this is the end of humankind, we dare not take away the chances some other life-form might have to succeed where we failed. If we retaliate, there will not be a dog, a deer, an ape, a bird or fish or lizard to carry the evolutionary torch. In the name of justice, if we must condemn and destroy ourselves, let us not condemn all life along with us! We are heavy enough with sins. If we must destroy, let us stop with destroying ourselves!

Morals: They're nothing but a coded survival instinct!

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.

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.

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

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

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

If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?

The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and ... and earns. It's a thing he can't have when he's very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it's truly part of him as long as he lives.

Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you?” “It's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted and illogical and then coming face to face with yourself, looking at yourself exactly as you look to everyone else?

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.

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.

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

Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone." "Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone." He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.

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.

You must write to the people's expertise.

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 it is crud.

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

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

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.

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.

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.