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" 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

Well

Lost

Story

Related Quotes:

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

Theodore Sturgeon

Beginning

Wife

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

" 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

Saying

People

" Ninety percent of everything is crap. "

" I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey. "

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

Theodore Sturgeon

Important

Life

" As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing. "

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

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

Theodore Sturgeon

Something

Always

" 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. "

" Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas. "

" There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts. "

" There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done. "

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

" There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do. "

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

Theodore Sturgeon

Anything

Enough

" You must write to the people's expertise. "

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

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