Theodore Sturgeon quotes

Theodore Sturgeon was an influential American science fiction and fantasy writer. His work is celebrated for its deep psychological insight and focus on human relationships. He inspired generations of writers and contributed significantly to the growth of speculative fiction. Here are 85 of his quotes:

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon

We don't believe anything we don't want to believe.

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon

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

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

Theodore Sturgeon

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Theodore Sturgeon

There are only three ways of dealing with sex. It may be gratified; it may be repressed; or it may be sublimated. The latter is, through history, often an ideal and frequently a success, but it is always an instability.

Theodore Sturgeon

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

Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?

Theodore Sturgeon

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.

Theodore Sturgeon

Is it men's disgust of women that makes so many of them treat women with such contempt? Is it that which makes it so easy to point out that the Don Juans and the Lotharios, for all their hunger for women, are often merely trying to see how many women they can punish?

Theodore Sturgeon

As Adam said when his wife fell out of the tree-Eve's dropping again.

Theodore Sturgeon

Reality isn't the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we're engineered for it. It's a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can't tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.

Theodore Sturgeon

You cannot be objective about this because you have been indoctrinated, sermonized, drenched, imbued, inculcated and policed on the matter since first you wore blue booties. You come from a time and place in which the maleness of the male, and the femaleness of the female, and the importance of their difference, were matters of almost total preoccupation.

Theodore Sturgeon