On Writing | Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012
Ray Bradbury working at home in Los Angeles, 1963
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”
“Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.”
“I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.”
” I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.”
“You fail only if you stop writing.”
“You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.”
“A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scenery.”
“I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.”
“A writer’s past is the most important thing he has. Sometimes an object, a mask, a ticket stub — anything at all — helps me remember a whole experience, and out of that may come an idea for a story. So I’m a packrat — I’ve kept everything I’ve ever cared about since childhood.”
” Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”
“I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.”
Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012
