Life & Wisdom Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon’s line reads like a craft lesson disguised as a moral stance: prose should be lean because language is a tool, not decor. “Written very tightly” signals control, compression, an almost engineering-minded distrust of slack. It’s also a quiet flex. In science fiction and fantasy - genres long treated as pulp and paid by the word - tight writing is a refusal of the marketplace’s incentives. He’s saying: I won’t pad. I won’t sell you air.

The second sentence sharpens into something like an ethic. “There’s no point” isn’t aesthetic fussiness; it’s a utilitarian verdict. Words have to be “appl[ied],” an unexpectedly manual verb that frames writing as work you do with language, not performance you do with language. The subtext is anti-preciousness: no ornamental synonyms, no rhetorical vapor, no sentences that exist to show the writer off. If a word isn’t doing a job - specifying character, advancing a thought, tightening a mood - it’s dead weight.

Context matters: Sturgeon was celebrated for emotional, human-scale SF that relied on clarity and psychological precision rather than gadgetry. Tightness becomes a way to smuggle tenderness and moral complexity into a field that could default to melodrama or exposition. The quote’s real bite is its implied critique of writers who treat language as costume jewelry. Sturgeon treats it as a set of instruments: chosen, calibrated, and put to use.