Life & Wisdom Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon frames writing less as a calling than as a getaway car: when the real-world “caper” proves too risky, the page becomes the safest place to commit it. The delicious tension in “immoral courage” is doing most of the work. He’s not confessing a lack of bravery in the usual, virtuous sense; he’s admitting he couldn’t summon the nerve to be bad. That little twist flatters neither the outlaw nor the moralist. It locates the teenage Sturgeon in a more interesting middle zone: hungry for transgression, wary of consequence, and quick to discover that imagination can deliver the thrill without the handcuffs.

The phrase “once I had all the facts in” hints at an early reporter’s instinct, a grounding in the real that would later distinguish his science fiction from gadgetry. He researched the world well enough to be tempted by it, then retreated into narrative not as an escape from reality but as a method of processing it. The subtext is that fiction isn’t the opposite of truth; it’s what you do when truth arrives with a price tag.

Then comes the self-deprecation: “I didn’t have any skills for writing as such.” It’s a modesty play, but also a quiet thesis about form. Constraints (youth, lack of craft, limited space) produce compression. “So it came out in 1500 words” reads like an origin story for a short-story writer: the accidental discovery that intensity, not length, is the medium for smuggling dangerous ideas past your own fear.