If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
Interpretation
The quote expresses frustration with traditional education and its constraints on creativity.
Ray Bradbury's quote highlights the tension between conventional teaching methods and the innovative, often unconventional writing styles of creative individuals. He suggests that if educators cannot appreciate challenging and imaginative sentence structures, they should not impose their rigid standards on creative expression, instead indulging in their own less inspiring creations.
In practice
During a speech about creative writing, this quote can emphasize the importance of originality.
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.
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship - nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.
The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.
It is never too late to expand the mind of a person on the autism spectrum.
I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.
Books-bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
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