Build Your Wings on the Way Down
RIP Ray Bradbury.
He advocated writing spontaneously, frequently, and with passion, reiterating the necessity of loving your craft.
Notable quotes from Mr. Bradbury.
"There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel." ( I'm hoping he was wrong about this one)
"Don't talk about it; write."
"Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember."
"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."
"I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it."
"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."
“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.”
"Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down."And a quote on death and dying.
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there."
The world is a better place for having had Ray Bradbury in it.
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I was stunned and saddened by Bradbury's death. He was one of the best among "contemporary" writers with a vision, and he was fearless in what he wrote. I say this with a measure of regret, but I tend to agree with Bradbury about the value of books. They have a texture, and a smell that create and hold sense memories (the sense of smell creates the strongest sense memories we own) which can never be replaced by ones and zeros and plastic boxes. When he wrote "Fahrenheit 451," it was almost prophetic. While he could not know it, it was nearly a metaphor for the current trend of book stores going out of business because it's so very much easier to hold a plastic gadget than to notice the feel, heft, and smell of musty old books, and to shamelessly dog-ear their pages..
Thanks, Labman, for sharing a really wonderful treatise about the man and his works. He will be missed. .
An genius author indeed and his work will love on for centuries to come! I like how you phrased that he didn't graduate from college, he graduated from the library. The same is true for A LOT of people these days, in particular entrepreneurs. Yes, they learn but often times they don't let college or uni slow them down.
He actually spent 3 days a week for 10 years in his local library. He read every book inside the doors. Pretty awesome idea. By the time he was done he had read over 1000 books and said that he had 10,000 stories to write. No wonder he was so prolific.
That is crazy...I am sure he had a lot to draw on when he was writing...an endless vocab, storylines, characters and knowledge set!
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My favorite quote is his last one on dying. What a nice goal to have.