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!)
Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Dreams are imaginative thoughts, while accomplishments are grounded in reality; together, they shape our understanding of humanity's journey.
Ray Bradbury's quote highlights the interplay between imagination and reality, suggesting that dreams often seem like mere fantasies while achievements are rooted in concrete efforts. He transcends this duality by concluding that the entire narrative of human progress reflects a blend of both fact and fiction, implying that what we aspire to and what we achieve cannot be fully separated, intertwining our creativity and science.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about pursuing one's dreams, this quote can encourage the audience to see the value of both dreams and achievements.
More from Ray Bradbury
All quotes βI never went to college, so I went to the library.
There must be something in books, something we canβt imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You donβt 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.
Similar quotes
A liberal to me is one who - and it suits some of the dictionary definitions - is unbeholden to any specific belief or party or group or person, but makes up his or her mind on the basis of the facts and the presentation of those facts at the time. That defines what I am.
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?
All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.
Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perhaps it has to do with an instinctive belief that life needs umpires.