In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
Interpretation
Writers often feel like outsiders in the film industry, despite its perceptions of knowledge and creativity.
Ray Bradbury suggests that in Hollywood, there is a prevailing arrogance among filmmakers who believe they possess all the answers. This creates a barrier for writers, particularly novelists and short-story creators, who find themselves on the fringes of this culture, struggling to produce their work in an environment that doesn't fully appreciate their art or their unique perspective.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the struggles of writers in the film industry.
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 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.
Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.
We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don't completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.
I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver.
The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.
Music is never stationary; successive forms and styles are only like so many resting-places - like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal.
My strength is looking for composition and light, and I think those things come in the quieter times of war or photographing people affected on the margins of war - civilians, refugees; that is where I really excel.
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