Quotes About Inspiration

The ideas will follow me. When they're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them.

It is not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books...take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. — Ray Bradbury

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.

For only after, can one nail down, examine, explain. To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill. Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation.

Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating.

I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me.

It is a wise writer who knows his own subconcious. And not only knows it but lets it speak of the world as it and it alone has sensed it and shaped it to its own truth.

Ten years of doing everything wrong suddenly became the right idea, the right scene, the right characters, the right day, the right creative time.

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. M

This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are.

Writing is not a serious business. It's a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say 'Oh, my God, what word? Oh, Jesus Christ…', you know. Now, to hell with that. It's not work. If it's work, stop and do something else.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your creative muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury

when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.

I want to wake people up and make them care about being alive in this universe.

The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.

We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. A writer's work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything.

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering.

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what the books have to say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

A young reader finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it. You've got to say, Well, to hell with you. And the cat says, Wait a minute. He's not behaving the way most humans do. Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?