“You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.” “Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.” “The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’” “I just act and react and emotionalize and all good stuff comes out. Nobody’s ever thought their way to anything in literature.” “You have to live in a cloud of emotions. You rev yourself up. Give yourself time in the middle of the afternoon, or when you’re waking up early in the morning, when you’re in that kind of wonderful, euphoric state in-between, on the verge of dreams when you get a kind of nuclear bombardment of all kinds of fragments of ideas jumping around inside your head and hitting each other. They begin to fuse and detonate each other. It’s a very hard thing to describe. You don’t have any control over your mind at a time like that, and you don’t want it, see? Let it run wild! Then watch it remotely at the bottom of your skull. Look up at all those things running around wild, then jump up and run over to the typewriter and feed them in!” “I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is; in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time! There’s plenty of time. You need all of these cross-references. You never know when your head is going to use this fuel, this food for its purposes.” “I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.” “I’ve tried for 20 years at least to say I’m not afraid of machines, I’m not afraid of the computer, I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over.” “Young writers shouldn’t kid themselves about learning to write. The best way to do that is to train yourself in the short story. Read every damn one that’s ever been written, and there aren’t that many really good ones. You must live feverishly inside a library. Colleges are not going to do you any good unless you are born, raised and live in a library every day of your life.” “I always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day. That’s three or four hundred thousand words a year. Most of that will be bilge, but the rest …? It will save your life!” “Don’t talk about it; write.” writersdigest/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/21-ray-bradbury-quotes-your-moment-of-friday-writing-zen
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 16:22:00 +0000
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