Life & Wisdom Quote by 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, Writer

About this Quote

Sturgeon’s jab lands because it’s less a takedown of Ayn Rand’s ideas than a refusal of her chosen disguise. He grants her the one thing her admirers insist on - impact - then immediately strips away the prestige that usually comes with it. “Huge impact” becomes a backhanded compliment: influence is not the same as art, and sometimes it’s the opposite of it.

The sharpest move is his criteria for “lousy”: not syntax or plotting, but temperament. “No compassion and virtually no humor” isn’t just a moral complaint; it’s an aesthetic one. For Sturgeon, fiction is a technology for empathy, contradiction, and the messy interior life that ideology tries to sand down. Humor matters here as a pressure valve, a sign that a writer can see their own argument from the side and let ambiguity breathe. Rand’s work, he implies, can’t tolerate that kind of self-undermining, so it compensates with certainty.

Calling her novels “a philosophical and economical message… passing off as fiction” frames them as propaganda with character names. “Economical” is pointed: it yokes her moral universe to market logic, suggesting her narrative machinery exists to deliver a system, not to discover a person. Sturgeon, writing from midcentury speculative fiction’s humanist wing, is also defending genre’s legitimacy: real science fiction, at its best, smuggles big ideas through lived experience. Rand, he argues, reverses the exchange - and that reversal is why her stories feel like sermons wearing costumes.

Quote Details

Topic	Writing
Source	Help us find the source
Cite	Cite this Quote

More Quotes by Theodore Add to List

About the Author

Theodore Sturgeon (February 26, 1918 - May 8, 1985) was a Writer from USA.

36 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message"

Jerry B. Jenkins, Novelist

Jerry B. Jenkins

"I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work"

Alain de Botton, Writer

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

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige"

George Murray, Poet

"I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me"

Peter Benchley, Author

"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself"

Jim Rohn, Businessman

Jim Rohn

"Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They're generally smarter and more interesting, but they're often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out"

Liev Schreiber, Actor

"There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work"

Dennis Potter, Dramatist

"However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously"

Wally Lamb, Author

"I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity"

Chaim Potok, Author

"Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything"

Raymond Queneau, Poet

"I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics"

Richard Attenborough, Actor

"I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general"

Eric Brown, Writer

"Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up"

Joan Didion, Author

"I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else"

Laurell K. Hamilton, Writer

"The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end"

Chaim Potok, Author

"I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"Fiction is socially meaningful"

David Guterson, Author