You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Interpretation
Embrace a love for reading and creativity to transform your life and the world around you.
In this quote, Ray Bradbury emphasizes the importance of daily reading and immersing oneself in literature as a means of enhancing life and personal growth. He poetically describes how engaging with books can inspire profound love and creativity, ultimately allowing individuals to reshape their realities and influence the world positively.
In practice
As a speech at a library opening to inspire young readers.
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.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.
Every film teaches you something; every experience on every film set with every co-star teaches you something. You learn something new. I think the challenge is to keep working harder and doing better.
Clutter is the disease of American writing.
Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it's the only place where we can keep track of ideas.
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