Ray Bradbury’s Creative Truths
150+ quotes from Ray Bradbury that may help you better live The Creative Life
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) wrote stories, novels, poems, essays, plays, TV shows and screenplays for over 70 years.
He never went to college. But educated himself at the public library.
He made nothing his first year writing, nothing his second year, and $10 his third. And kept writing for 60 more years.
What follows is everything I’ve found, so far, that he said about The Creative Life — 150+ quotes from 20+ sources, spanning ages 41 to 90.
As a preview, here’s a standout quote from each source:
Age 41, The Writer’s Trade Journal, February 1962:
I have always believed that when one writes for oneself, out of love and excitement, quantity writing results in quality writing.
Quantity writing for other people, for other aims, becomes hack writing.
But quantity writing when one does it for the fun and passion of discovering all about the truth inside one’s self cannot possibly result in bad writing.
It can only result in more exciting discoveries.
Age 42, “The Story of a Writer,” 1962:
I worry about rejection, but not too much. The real fear isn’t rejection, but that there won’t be enough time in your life to write all the stories you have in you.
So every time I put a new one in the mail, I know I’ve beaten death again.
Age 47, The Press-Courier, December 1967:
There is no way of educating ourselves that is wrong.
We must try everything. We cannot be snobs. We must grow up surrounded by mediocrity so we can identify it; so we can identify excellence when we encounter it.
If you don’t learn to know what is good, what is bad and what is excellent, then you snobs, like the politicians, will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.
Age 47, Writer’s Digest, 1967:
The average young person you meet today seems to have the motto, “If at first you don’t succeed, stop right there.” They want to start at the top of their profession and not to learn their art on the way up. That way they miss all the fun.
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’ve written about 2,000 short stories; I’ve only published about 300, and I feel I’m still learning.
Any 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 a writer.
Age 48, CBC, January 1969:
We are the tension-collecting animals of this world. We are that particular creature who decides to put away violence most of the time. ... We save things. We are the only creature in the world that does this. Every other animal acts in the instant to destroy or run from destruction. We choose not to do so. We build walls; we build cities.
And so, inside these cities, inside these walls, we need artists — we need people, like myself, who take hold of a piece of reality and say, “This is what it is.”
We’ve saved up attention for tears, so I, as a writer, come along and try to help you cry at the right time. We save up attention for laughter — perhaps for our silly politicians — and I come along as a writer and help you to laugh. We save up tensions of murdering. The wonderful fact about civilization is that most people do not murder, that most of us are peace-loving, that we do make do in the best sense. So I come along with a story and enable you, for an hour, to murder — so that the next day you don’t have to do it in reality.
Nietzsche puts it beautifully: “We have art that we do not die of reality.” Reality is too much with us.
I think we know all of the basic facts of life, each of us. We know too much about death. We know too much about age. We know too much about love that sometimes fails us. People do go away. People do vanish. Friends go off over the world and never come back. Our children finally go out into the world on their own. All of us, finally, leave the fact of existence.
Age 49, Los Angeles Times, March 1970:
If you’re doing something you love, and that’s the center of your life, you don’t need groups of people, political movements, religions, diamonds, or status.
Age 49, The Bulldog, April 1970:
When a person finds out who he is the richer the world becomes.
Age 52, Journal of Popular Culture, 1973:
Everything I’ve done is flawed. Most of what is written or has been written over the years is flawed in some way. Moby Dick is flawed. Shakespeare’s plays are flawed, full of carbuncles, acne, and pimples. They just happen to be brilliant and eternal.
So, what the hell! You go with your own flaws. It’s part of growing. Getting accustomed to the way you look is growing. We would all like to be Steve Reeves and lift 400 pounds, I suppose, but that’s not our destiny.
Some of my literary children are very common and plain. Some are quite beautiful with moles on their cheeks. I really have a very relaxed attitude toward my screenplays, my plays, my novels, and so on.
Age 53, CUNY TV, January 1974:
I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads: “Don’t think.”
You must never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data, you do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter, but at the typewriter, you should be living.
It should be a living experience.
Age 59, The Washington Post, September 1979:
The reason I shift gears constantly, why I’m doing an opera, why I’ve done essays, why I’ve written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing.
This means becoming a student again. I believe in creative failing — to continue to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you’ve got a thousand poems behind you and you’re relaxed and you finally write a good poem.
Age 65, Writer’s Digest, February 1986
When I was finishing my new novel, I put myself on that kind of emotional routine.
I made a conscious effort to think about the novel before I went to sleep so that my subconscious would give me answers when I woke up.
Then, when I was lying in bed in the morning, I would say: “What was it that I was working on yesterday in the novel? What is the emotional problem today?”
I wait for myself to get into an emotional state, not an intellectual state, then jump up and write it.
The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.
Age 70, The Guardian, 1990
When I was 26 I met my wife. She was a bookshop clerk. She has been my lifeline. The day we married I handed five dollars to the minister and he handed it back to me. He said: ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? You’re going to need this.’
Age 72, The Seattle Times, March 12, 1993
The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us — it’s all junk, all trash, tidbits of news.
The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind.
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Age 74, Vancouver Sun, June 14, 1995
I do indeed get along well with myself. The two of us, the me that writes and the me that watches me write, are a rambunctious pair; I enjoy our twin relationship, not knowing, even at this minute, which of us is in charge, the emotional dynamite-expert, or the quasi-intellectual who occasionally has to say ‘Calmness’ or ‘Serenity’ or ‘Sit down and be still’ when my outbursts get too anarchic.
Age 76, San Mateo County Times, January 28, 1997
The people who have mental blocks are the people who do things they shouldn’t be doing. The people who take screenplays they shouldn’t write or books they shouldn’t write — they’re going to wind up with dry spells, because their subconscious says, ‘I’m going to cut off the water works!’
Age 79, Alibi, 1999
[On the value of fiction]
It makes us dream and it makes us accomplish.
Einstein had to dream first, didn’t he, before he wrote his theorem? Darwin the same way. The Wright brothers had dreams of flying. They lay in bed at night at the end of the 19th century and said, “I wonder how we can put wings on our bicycles?” And they finally did it.
You’ve got to read myths — Greek myths, Roman myths, Egyptian — and you have to dream yourself into being.
The purpose of fiction is not to nail you to the ground as facts do, but to take you to the edge of the cliff and kick you off so you build your wings on the way down.
Age 81, Salon, August 29, 2001
The best advice I ever got was from Somerset Maugham’s book ‘Summing Up,’ which I read in high school. His advice was: “Don’t look left or right, look straight ahead, get your work done, enjoy your work, do what you want to do, not what someone else wants you to do.”
And that’s been the story of my life. Not pleasing my friends, not pleasing any editor, just myself.
Age 83, Barnes & Noble, Summer 2003
I spent three years standing on a street corner, selling newspapers, making ten dollars a week.
I did that job every day for three hours and the rest of the time I wrote because I was in love with writing.
Age 83, Chicago Tribune, August 24, 2003
Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.
Age 88, New York Times, June 19, 2009
Libraries raised me.
I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money.
When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.
Age 90, Time, August 23, 2010
All of my life, I’ve jumped off the cliff and built my wings. It works every single time. It never fails.
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