It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.
Interpretation
Reading is not just about the content, but also about the sensory experiences that come with it.
Ray Bradbury emphasizes that the experience of reading encompasses not only the words contained within a book but also the physical sensations and memories associated with it. The tactile sensations and unique smells evoke a deeper emotional connection to the literature and enrich the overall reading experience, blending the sensory with the intellectual.
In practice
During a book club meeting to emphasize the joys of physical books.
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.
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations.
When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.
I did not clip the wings of my daughter to fly.
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
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