It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.
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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Theodore Sturgeon

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.
Theodore Sturgeon

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

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.
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

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

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

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

Writing is a communication.
Theodore Sturgeon

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.
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

You must write to the people's expertise.
Theodore Sturgeon

You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one.
Theodore Sturgeon