Ray Bradbury Quotes

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I'm not a 'long writer' and have never wanted to write a novel or even a novella. Poetry, like flash fiction, provides a readily accessible canvas to play with. Whether to express an emotion or share a vignette, these forms are often interchangeable.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

When you do not have the dialogue to explain things, you will use everything to show and to tell the story. I think that this is what makes you believe that it is impeccable.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.