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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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