Ray Bradbury Quotes

What you look for as a reader is somebody who is going to take you and say, 'C'mon. Come into the story. I'm going to show you what there is to see.' The guide who is going to tell you, 'Pay attention over there,' or, 'Do you remember that other thing? Now watch!'

What I always try to do in all my books is to make the stories such that if you don't agree with me politically or you're not interested in the thematics, the story will still keep you turning the pages.

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

I like to end stories where the readers have a little room to run. They can resolve things as they like in their own mind.

A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.

Time is a river, and books are boats.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

I mostly write short stories. They are best written in a continuous creative process. You have a feel of immediacy.

With a novel, you have to have a story. It's much more important to have it matter to the reader what happens to people, and it has to make sense and end in a way that is satisfying. So I spend a lot more time thinking about that. Then the writing itself usually is easier for me, because I know where it's going.

my crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.

The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can't manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.

Remember: A best-selling book usually follows a simple rule, It's a wonderful story, wonderfully told; not, It's a wonderfully told story.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.

Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I'd head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.

Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

It's a funny thing about stories. It doesn't feel like you make them up, more like you find them. You type and type and you know you haven't got it yet, because somewhere out there, there's that perfect thing -- the unexpected ending that was always going to happen. That place you've always been heading for, but never expected to go.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.