Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.
Interpretation
Stay focused on your tasks by eliminating distractions.
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining focus and not allowing external influences to disrupt your work. Ray Bradbury suggests that if you carry unfinished tasks into the next day, you risk overthinking and complicating them unnecessarily, often in an effort to meet others' expectations rather than your own.
In practice
This quote can inspire students preparing for exams to minimize distractions.
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 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. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
I never went to college, so I went to the library.
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour.
The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
Persist and persevere, and you will find most things that are attainable, possible.
If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.
That feeling of finishedness does not come all at once, and it is not easily won, but I think once you get there it is hard to go back.
You might say what if I screw up? Then screw up big! Go for it! Do a big screw-up!
It's easy to give up, and that's the one thing we cannot do. That's what gives me a reason for working: to leave people with a little more courage, with a little hope that has been nourished. Even if, of course, it's going to disappear, whatever touches one isn't lost forever.
If you have a strong mind and plant in it a firm resolve, you can change your destiny.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.