"It's ridiculous to go around reading reviews. It's too late to do any good. The work is done by the time they appear. The people who praise you can't help you with your next project and the people who criticize you can't deter you. So, what's the use? You can't pay attention to either. Instead, you have to get on with your work!"
"Half of me is sunlight, half of me is shadow, and it has to be both. All I want is to be part of the fecund process by which the universe is trying to discover itself, and to have fun doing it."
"I use a library the same way I’ve been describing the creative process as a writer — I don’t go in with lists of things to read, I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don’t fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book, and fall in love with it. You can only go with loves in this life."
"Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody. And nothing will ever be the same again."
"I want to use time well. I want to drain it of its meaning and intensity as I pass through it, so that I come to the end of my life, as Shaw once put it, having completely wasted myself away; but good ways, so that you've never let a moment pass that hasn't been delicious."
"I've often been accused of being too emotional and sentimental, but I believe in honest sentiment, and the need to purge ourselves at certain times, which is ancient. Men would live at least five or six more years and not have ulcers if they could cry better."
"People often ask me how I stay so young, how I've kept such a youthful outlook. The answer is simple: Live a life in which you cram yourself with all kinds of metaphors, all kinds of activities and all kinds of love. And take time to laugh - find something that makes you truly happy - every day of your life."
- Ray BradburyThis message has been edited. Last edited by: Richard,
"It simply follows that quantity produces quality. Only if you do a lot will you ever be any good. If you do very little, you'll never have quality of idea or quality of output. The excitement and creativity comes from a whole lot of doing; hoping you'll suddenly be struck by lightning. If you only write a few things, you're doomed. The history of literature is the history of prolific people. 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!"
"I remember going to a party in New York about 35 years ago. They all called me Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. I said, 'You, ma'am, your name and phone number? And you, sir, your phone number? And you, sir?' And they said, 'Why are you taking our phone numbers?' I said, 'Because the night we land on the moon, you're going to get called.' I was in London when we did. I called three of them, and when they answered I said, 'Stupid son of a bitch,' and hung up."
“It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid. And I want to save the future generation, I want to teach them to read when they’re 5 and 6 and 7 years old. If we don’t do that, we lose them forever."
“The library was the great watering place where animals, large and small, came from the night to drink and smile at each other across the green-glass shadowed glades between the book-mountains....And there was always that special moment when, at the big doors, you paused before you opened them out and went in among all those lives, in among all those whispers of old voices so high and quiet it would take a dog trotting between the stacks to hear them. And trot you did.”
