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.
When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless.
The psychedelic experience is simply a compressed instance of what we call understanding, so that living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding, so that every day you know more and see into things with greater depth than you did before. This is a process of education.
As regards parents, I should like to see them as highly educated as possible, and I do not restrict this remark to fathers alone.
Consequently, the only thing I learned in school was typing. In the old days, people like me who don't have college degrees had a hard time thriving in society. But today, the ability to learn on your own or from your peers has become really easy. I think this change is leading to a fundamental disruption in education. Independent and lifelong learning are really starting to peak - there is an inflection point coming around how people learn.
I've been telling my students, 'Imitate, imitate.' And they say, 'Well, what if I plagiarize, or what if I'm not original? I want to be myself.' And I always tell them, 'Your self will shine through'... If you allow yourself to feel deeply and honestly, what you say won't be like anyone else.
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