Ray Bradbury

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you?

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.

It 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.

You 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.

Think 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.

To 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.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

What is it about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?...The thing man wanted to invent, but never did...If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledygook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

Suddenly the day was gone, night came out from under each tree and spread.

A day without writing was a little death.

No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.

... bums on the outside, libraries inside.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

What should I do?" "Throw up in your typewriter every morning." "Yeah." "Clean up every noon.

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.