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.
Goal setting has traditionally been based on past performance. This practice has tended to perpetuate the sins of the past.
I like to think of ideas as potential energy. They're really wonderful, but nothing will happen until we risk putting them into action.
Failing forward is the ability to get back up after you've been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.
Whatever happens, there are always things you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have scored a third. That's perfectionism. That's what makes you progress in life.
The greatest thing about tomorrow is, I will be better than I am today...There is no such thing as a setback. The lessons I learn today I will apply tomorrow, and I will be better.
Perseverance is more than endurance. It is endurance combined with absolute assurance and certainty that what we are looking for is going to happen.
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