01UndatedIf you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
02UndatedThe good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
04UndatedEvery morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
05UndatedYou grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
06UndatedWrite a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
07UndatedFrom now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
08UndatedAny man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer."]Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
09UndatedWriting is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
10UndatedOurs is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
12UndatedThink of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
13UndatedIt is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
14UndatedTo feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
15UndatedI came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
16UndatedYell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
17UndatedRemember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an actionis through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire letrun, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It canonly be dynamic. So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
18UndatedHello!" He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?" "I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it. "I don't think I'd like that," he said. "You might if you tried." "I never have." She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good." "What do you do, go around trying everything once?" he asked. "Sometimes twice.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
19UndatedHe glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
21UndatedTime was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
23UndatedThe minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
