Ray Bradbury Quotes About Writing
-
Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.
→ -
Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!
→ -
All of my writing is God-given.
→ -
I don’t write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.
→ -
Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
→ -
There are certain kinds of people who write science fiction. I think a lot of us married late. A lot of us are mama's boys. I lived at home until I was 27. But most of the writers I know in any field, especially science fiction, grew up late. They're so interested in doing what they do and in their science, they don't think about other things.
→ -
You have to be very productive in order to become excellent. You have to go through a poor period and a mediocre period, and then you move into your excellent period. It may be very well be that some of you have done quite a bit of writing already. You maybe ready to move into your good period and your excellent period. But you shouldn't be surprised if it becomes a very long process.
→ -
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.
→ -
This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?
→ -
How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.
→ -
Not to write, for many of us, is to die.
→ -
Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.
→ -
You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
→ -
I want your loves to be multiple. I don't want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it.
→ -
If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
→ -
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
→ -
We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.
→ -
I've been writing every day of my life for 65 years.
→ -
In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.
→ -
Men are nuts. Young men are crazy. We all love toys. I'm toy oriented. I write about toys. I've got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative.
→ -
Everything of mine is permeated with my love of ideas-both big and small. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it grabs me and holds me, facinates me. And then I'll run out and something about it... I write for fun.
→ -
I would not see our candle blown out in the wind. It is a small thing, this dear gift of life handed us mysteriously out of immensity. I would not have that gift expire... If I seem to be beating a dead horse again and again, I must protest: No! I am beating, again and again, living man to keep him awake and move his limbs and jump his mind... What's the use of looking at Mars through a telescope, sitting on panels, writing books, if it isn't to guarantee, not just the survival of mankind, but mankind surviving forever!
→ -
People try to force things. It's disastrous. Just leave your mind alone. Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.
→ -
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.
→ -
I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.
→ -
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
→ -
I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
→ -
If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.
→ -
I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
→ -
...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.
→
Related Authors
-
Isaac Asimov Author -
Jules Verne Novelist -
Mark Twain Author -
Erich Maria Remarque Author -
Edgar Allan Poe Author -
H. G. Wells Writer -
George Orwell Novelist -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
Philip K. Dick Novelist -
Neil Gaiman Author -
H. P. Lovecraft Author -
Arthur C. Clarke Film writer -
Kurt Vonnegut Writer -
Stephen King Author -
Robert A. Heinlein Science writer -
J. D. Salinger Writer -
Fredric Brown Fiction writer -
Aldous Huxley Writer -
Ursula K. Le Guin Author