Ray Bradbury, Zen In The Art Of Writing Quotes

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

I take this continent with me into the grave.

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

And metaphors like cats behind your smile, Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride, Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth